


Daybreak

by throttlegainwell



Series: Circadian [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, HYDRA Trash Party, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Porn, M/M, Not Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase Two Compliant, Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 09:13:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 42,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14766758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throttlegainwell/pseuds/throttlegainwell
Summary: Hydra uses the Winter Soldier to keep their captives in line by brutal means. One visit is usually enough to instill obedience. But this latest prisoner, Rogers, seems to have caught their interest in a big way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please take the warnings for this story very seriously. This is NOT a happy fic. I like to think that there’s an emotional payoff for those so inclined, but the bulk of this story is upsetting and disturbing. If you’re looking for whump, this is the one you want. If you’re looking for hurt/comfort, this might work for you. But if anything in the warnings is something that might be unsafe for you to consume, please close this story. These warnings are by no means exhaustive, but I think they broadly illustrate what type of fic this is and should give you an idea of whether or not you can or would like to read it:  
> graphic and violent sexual abuse, physical and psychological torture including sensory deprivation and isolation, food restriction, prisoner abuse, coercive rape by deception, forced drugging, a brief description of predatory behavior toward and attempted molestation of a child, a brief non-graphic reference to incestuous abuse of a minor, and all the dehumanization that’s inherent to a story from the Winter Soldier era. 
> 
> **Some of these things are done by the Winter Soldier.**
> 
> Weirdly enough, at its heart, this is a story that explores the resilience of the human spirit and the power of kindness. But it’s a really uncomfortable, ugly road to get there, and it's definitely not for everyone. Seriously.
> 
> Written for [this prompt](https://hydratrashmeme.dreamwidth.org/2271.html?thread=5112031#cmt5112031), with slight divergences:
> 
> _Hydra regularly sends the Winter Soldier to rape their captives, as it helps keep them in line._
> 
> _He gets sent to rape someone with a sensory deprivation hood on, not something on uncommon, but later they send back in, this time with orders to act like a fellow captive and pump him for information. The hood is off during these sessions, the man, Steve, claims to recognize the winter soldier and the soldier uses it to his advantage._
> 
> _Every night the soldier is sent on his rounds to rape whoever Hydra feels needs it, and Steve is always on the list. Since Steve wears the hood, he doesn't know that Bucky, who he spends days with, is the one raping him at night. Until one night where they send Bucky in to rape Steve without the hood._

The Soldier pulled up his pants and exited the cell. The whimpering that followed only lasted until he’d turned the corner, and by the time he’d done up the closures and straightened his armor, the smell of bodily fluids had dulled, too. He had the answers he’d ostensibly been sent in to extract, but he’d long suspected that these side missions were less interrogations than they were outright punishment. It concerned him only distantly, like an old break that throbbed when it rained but was easily ignored. He had his orders, and though this was a waste of his skills and he performed sub-optimally under these conditions, even he had to admit that there was a tactical, psychological advantage to him being the one to carry them out: he was terrifying, and he was very good at it.

He’d barely stepped out of the shower stall when he was informed that a new prisoner needed to be introduced to the way they operated this base, and he was finding it difficult to acclimate. The Soldier guessed that meant he didn’t intend to go down easy and had probably bitten someone’s dick already, but he was too valuable to kill or maim, at least just yet. His expression remained neutral as he dripped on the concrete floor. He reached for his uniform instead of the towel, sensing the impatience of his superior, and he was right; before he could dress, he was being waved out of the room. He carried his clothes and weapons under one arm, naked and exposed, as he marched back down the maze of hallways to the cell blocks.

He moved instinctively to his right, but the officer opened a door to his left that he’d rarely been through, and the Soldier understood. This was where they kept the prisoners who were very dangerous, very valuable, or very doomed.

His stomach roiled slightly as he crossed the threshold into the short hallway. He hadn’t been permitted to eat in several hours, is how he rationalized it. He required huge amounts of calories, and his careful nutrition regimen had been interrupted for this. That was all.

The officer unlocked the door, and the Soldier stepped into the room, immediately scanning his surroundings. The door closed behind him without a word; it was understood that he knew what to do.

The concrete floor in this room was sealed for easier cleaning, slanted slightly toward a drain at the back. The lights were harsh, the air was cold and stale, and there were no corners. Nowhere to hide. No furniture that wasn’t anchored deep into the foundation, and the structure that did exist wasn’t exactly meant to relax on.

It was already occupied. Their intentions for him were obvious by how they’d positioned him: the platform, molded in one solid piece of metal strong enough to build skyscrapers out of, had been lowered flush with the floor. The Soldier had been in this room only a few times before, but he’d seen it raised to several different heights for several different purposes. That the prisoner was below him on the floor, like an animal, was significant. The rings in the platform accommodated a number of sizes and positions. The ones they’d picked kept the man’s legs immobilized in a kneeling position, with his knees pressed into grooves in the surface and the tops of his feet flat. No leverage and no wiggle room, soles exposed and vulnerable. His thighs were spread wide enough that hip dislocation could occur easily, but the Soldier didn’t yet know the damage they required, so he’d be careful. His arms were stretched taut over his head, shoulders straining, wrists bound to a retractable chain that fed up into the ceiling, and it was apparent that he’d been in this position for some time.

He was naked and already covered in various injuries, some of which had clearly been earned in a fight at least several hours ago, maybe even a day or so, and some obviously deliberate and fresh. But he was whole, and not so impaired that he couldn’t fight if he were free, and obviously dangerous enough to have warranted this particular treatment. Possibly valuable as well. But it was the danger that interested the Soldier, and even stripped and bound, it was obvious that he was formidable. He was big in stature, muscles well-defined, and somehow managed to infuse this subservient, humiliating posture with a defiance that rarely manifested in this place and never lasted long.

They were afraid of this one, and the Soldier suspected that he knew this.

The only thing about this situation that was unexpected was the hood over the man’s face. It wasn’t unheard of, but it had been some time since they’d bothered. The Soldier couldn’t be sure whether its purpose was practical or psychological, but since it rendered him unable to speak and likely unable to hear, the pretense of an interrogation was irrelevant. The Soldier was here for one reason, and with this man’s back arched painfully and his legs spread, it was clear where they expected him to begin.

He slipped a small knife from its sheath, dropped the suit by the door, and then approached.

He was light on his feet, able to move as though there were no substance to him, an advantage that made it all the more shocking when his targets were confronted with the very real density of his strong body and stronger arm. He’d heard people refer to him as a ghost, a kind of ephemeral, vengeful spirit; heard their whispers about how even the way he moved was barely human.

A very small motion caught his attention, stopping him short. Despite the near immobilization, one of the prisoner’s toes had twitched. It could have just been the position, but the Soldier waited, watching this time, and as he moved again, switching directions, another minuscule shift appeared, barely noticeable to the untrained eye. The man sensed his presence, maybe even felt his footfalls, and he was readying himself.

That’s when the Soldier realized that there was more to this man’s abilities than his obvious musculature. He was likely highly trained, but more than that, it was possible that he was enhanced. Maybe those bruises were more recent than they appeared; maybe the man healed fast. He suspected that he’d be in here a while, so perhaps they’d heal before his eyes. There was clearly something special to this one.

But it wasn’t his to puzzle out, and, honestly, he didn’t really care. He still needed to eat, then he’d have to shower again, and then report to the lab doctors before he’d be allowed to rest for his next mission in the field. He had other things to think about. This was just one of his duties.

He walked slowly around to his front, studying the man for any reaction. He wasn’t shaking, wasn’t fighting the heavy-duty and far from standard issue cuffs, gave no real reaction, but the muscles in his neck had tensed as though he was intentionally keeping himself very still, struggling against the urge to turn his head and follow sounds he likely couldn’t hear much of to begin with. The Soldier wondered if his eyes were closed under the hood or if he was staring straight ahead.

The knife had warmed in his hand already. He stopped a couple of feet away, staring, calculating. He flipped the knife back and forth, changing his grip, while he thought. The motion sent air currents across the man’s bare chest. The micro changes in the level of tension of his body was fascinating, as was the resolve with which he tried to hide them. He would have been successful with anyone but the Soldier, proving himself stoic and unaffected. On another day, even he might have missed it.

He glanced down. There was nothing on, around, or in his genitals, and the Soldier hadn’t been provided with anything, so their interest in him might not be scientific and they weren’t feeling creative. That made things easier. He wasn’t erect, which meant they didn’t really care what the Soldier did as long as he put him in his place. There was no lubricant anywhere in the room and the Soldier had run out of his personal supply. He’d barely had any for the last prisoner. He walked around again to verify, but as he’d suspected, there was no telltale gleam of wetness and his ass looked untouched.

He’d have to do this dry.

He didn’t try to keep his steps quiet as he approached the man from the front again, since it was clear that he could detect his presence to some degree wherever he went. He didn’t waste any more time.

The first thing he did was press the flat of the blade against the inside of the man’s thigh, high enough that he was within an inch of trimming the hair on his testicles -- and with a jerk of his wrist, a blade this sharp, he could.

He’d already been fairly certain that he had the prisoner’s attention, but now he was sure. The few muscles that hadn’t already been tensed stiffened immediately and without subtlety, and even though he couldn’t hope to see a damn thing, his head jerked down reflexively.

The Soldier didn’t enjoy this part of his work. He didn’t enjoy his work at all, really, but there were moments of quiet satisfaction, times when he knew he’d done a job well, people he knew the world was better off without and therefore he’d done the right thing eliminating. He didn’t enjoy this, but he wondered, for the first time in a long time, maybe decades, what this man had done to deserve this. Probably something terrible. Maybe something truly evil.

It had been a long night, and there were only so many times even he could get it up, so he knew it would be a while before he could get that part over with, and since he knew that’s what they wanted, he’d just have to work up to it in the meantime.

He scraped the knife down.

* * *

 

The mission was canceled. The Soldier didn’t ask questions, and he definitely didn’t look forward to missions, but he wasn’t sure when he’d last seen daylight or breathed air that wasn’t recycled through a ventilation system. He didn’t know how long it would be until the next time he’d get to be outside.

They had a new mission for him instead.

Your new target, they said, will not cooperate easily. He must be led without knowing he is being led. He is suspicious and clever, alert to the possibility of deception, expecting trickery. You are our only hope of breaking this man down, learning his secrets, and saving us from him.

They led him back to the room from the night before. He had spent hours in there doing his work. He didn’t know what the parameters were that would satisfy their goals, but it seemed to stretch on indefinitely, just him and the bound, suffering man, predator and prey performing in silence. He’d been forced to get a little creative, something he tried to avoid unless necessary.

You must be his confidant. He must grow to trust you. You can be docile, yes? Imagine the secrets a man tells to his dog but not his wife.

He blinked hard. “My arm. He’ll recognize it.” Maybe he hadn’t seen it, but it would be obvious that this was the implement that had tormented him. One of them. Dread pooled low in the Soldier’s belly, familiar but something he hadn’t felt in some time; like a breath he’d been holding so long he’d forgotten how, until he exhaled. He didn’t think they would remove his arm just for this, but the possibility nauseated him.

We’ve thought of that. Here, you must understand, this mission is of the utmost importance. You want to defeat the enemy, yes? You will cooperate. Hold out your arms.

It took some doing to squeeze the Soldier’s metal arm into the sleeve of the straight jacket. When they’d finished cinching it, his hands were both hidden and his shoulders both covered. It was a standard jacket, not meant for him; a simple flex would tear it at the seams. It was barely a hindrance.

Maybe he will have sympathy for you this way. Don’t be fooled. This is the enemy, and he must be crushed. Get what you can. You will give your full report and then you will have your meal. Good luck.

He allowed himself to be tripped as he entered the room, rolling into the fall so he would land on his side and not his face, careful not to let his metal arm thud into the floor and instead his flesh shoulder. The impact stole his breath for a few moments. The door closed heavily behind him, harder than the last time.

He took a moment to get into character, curled on his side facing the door, focusing on the throb of his shoulder in a way that he normally couldn’t afford to do with pain. They wanted his judgement of this subject, so they hadn’t told him much about him. There might be more information to come later, but for now he had to try to have a normal conversation in an abnormal situation between two very not normal people while pretending to be, well, normal. Just another prisoner, in the same boat.

The Soldier tried not to feel, generally, or at least to tamp down on the difficult feelings and not dwell in them, be consumed and undone by them. Feelings were distracting. Sometimes he floated in a haze through the day, unless he was training or working and needed to remain sharp, and it was easier. They were often sparse with details, but not like this. He was unprepared and loose in deep water. How did it feel to be a prisoner uncertain of his position or his fate? He could only guess, but sometimes he felt like a prisoner himself, so he tapped into those feelings that he ordinarily shut out very carefully. His performance had to feel authentic.

“Are you hurt?”

The Soldier startled, and for a moment he remained stunned that he’d been startled at all. He peered over his shoulder, getting his first glimpse of the man since the events of the previous night.

He coughed, hoarse as he offered, “Do you need help to sit up?”

He continued to stare. The man was still bound, but the chains had been slackened enough that he could moved somewhat about the room. He’d picked a section of curved wall to put his back to and collapsed into it, but he was starting to pull himself up to attention the longer he watched the Soldier. He hadn’t been hosed down after last night, when he’d been left covered in blood and the Soldier’s fluids, and his chest was still painted a rusty brown that overlaid the purple hues. It had run in streaks down his legs that were hidden by his position but had left smears on the floor. It was clear that he hadn’t moved from that spot once he’d picked it.

Of course the hood was gone. He’d expected that. But it was oddly shocking to finally see his face, his eyes alert and calculating, his mouth set in what might actually be a concerned frown. It was a strange combination, and for some reason, something almost like dizziness washed over the Solider at the sight of it.

Finally, the man moved as if to come over and help him. The Soldier artlessly rolled to his knees and turned around, sliding himself back to the wall before he slumped down and sighed. He didn’t have to feign exhaustion; he was always somewhat exhausted, but carefully never risked showing it. His hair flopped forward over his face and blocked out the harshness of the lights.

“I’m fine,” he said, letting the weariness seep in. That’s what people said, right? That they were fine, no matter what. It’s fine, I’m fine, you’re fine. As an afterthought, he added, “Thanks, though.”

He should let the man initiate the conversation. It was less suspicious if the Soldier appeared to have little interest, if he appeared to warm to the man instead of being overly eager from the start. People tended to be more preoccupied with themselves already, especially people in a situation like this. Self-interest, at least at the start, was more realistic.

For a long time, nothing happened, neither spoke, and the only movement was the careful, shallow rise and fall of the man’s chest. It was almost peaceful, and the Soldier actually got close to falling asleep, drifting in that in-between state.

“Who are you?” the man finally asked.

He peered through a gap in his bangs. He thought the man might be military, now that he had more postural freedom. He held himself like a fighter, like a leader, and not like a man in the aftermath of his first visit from the Soldier on his nightly rounds. It was impressive.

It wouldn’t last.

“Just another soldier,” he said, telling a half-truth while he considered how best to lie. The man would want a name. Too common might sound fake, too memorable would be bad as well. He sounded American. He might open up to a fellow compatriot easier, but he might also be quicker to notice inconsistencies. Still, the Soldier put on a good American, so it was worth the risk. Warily, as though he wasn’t sure he could trust his new cellmate, he offered, “Call me Jimmy.”

The man narrowed his eyes. It was surprisingly fascinating to watch the gears in his mind turn; it was clear that his thoughts were going a mile a minute, but they were indiscernible. He was smart, definitely. He considered the Soldier with a steadiness that didn’t suit the situation, a gravity that did.

“Rogers.”

The Soldier nodded in acknowledgement, though the name meant nothing to him. He shifted a little awkwardly, carefully flexing his fingers as much as he dared.

“Any reason they’ve got you trussed up?”

He snorted. He couldn’t help it. Rogers was sitting there in chains; a flick of a switch would drag him back to the multi-purpose torture platform where he’d be immobilized much more thoroughly than a mere scrap of cloth. “Any reason they’ve got you in enough hardware to lift a steel girder?”

Rogers’ mouth pinched at the corners at first, and he looked away, but then his shoulders relaxed slightly. “Turns out they learn from their mistakes.”

That much was true. He shrugged as much as he could. “Guess they’re just careful.” He paused. “You been here long?”

His eyes closed, and an odd expression crossed his face, like he was counting. “Not long. Don’t plan to be. You?”

“A while. Not sure. Feels like decades.” He wasn’t sure how old he was, but he knew how young he looked, and what it sounded like.

Rogers softened at that. “It’s two thousand fourteen, if that helps.” He looked around the room, glanced toward the door, gesturing at the jacket. “I could probably get that open for you.”

A surge of something unidentifiable shot up his spine. His mouth opened while he thought. “I don’t want to make them mad,” he settled on, and that was true, too.

Rogers nodded, a kind of sadness and gentleness in him that the Soldier hadn’t been on the receiving end of in … maybe he never had. Where had he seen it before, then?

His stomach growled, loud in the quiet of the small room.

“Are they starving you?”

The Soldier looked up, deciding how to proceed, but before he could answer or even look directly at Rogers, they were plunged into darkness. The heavy flap in the bottom of the door slid away, a thin stream of light from the hallway beyond spilling into the room, and then it was blocked by a tray being slid under. The flap closed, and it was dark again.

It was over in seconds, but it felt like chaos, rattled him like few things did, and he wasn’t sure why. The smell of weak broth reached him. It was probably cold.

“I think they want you to eat,” he said.

“Have they ever drugged your food or water?” Rogers asked immediately.

“Sometimes.” No point in lying about that one. “Not often. It’s not really their style. It’s probably safe. You should have something. You don’t know when they’ll be back.”

It seemed like a long time passed before the chains rattled across the room. Rogers sat before him and moved the items on the tray, likely trying to inspect them as best he could in the pitch black. The Soldier could hear him inhaling deeply, smelling for poisons. After a few more minutes, he moved again, and though the Soldier couldn’t see, he could feel Rogers a few inches away, and he thought he was facing him. He remembered the way Rogers had tracked his movements throughout the room even with the hood, how he had always seemed to know where he was and where he was headed.

“You should eat, too.” His voice was soft but firm.

“No, that’s yours,” the Soldier protested. “Besides, how would I?”

“But we’re both in here, and you’ve been trapped longer. You could be malnourished already. If you’ll let me, I’ll help you.”

The Soldier thought for a long time, aware that he had retreated, but he suspected that Rogers would wait for as long as it took, that he would understand, so he allowed himself this indulgence. His unease increased with every passing minute, turning him upside down and shaking him. Rogers knew nothing about Call Me Jimmy. He could be a murderer, a spy, an enemy; he was, in fact, all of these things. Rogers’ kindness hit him like vertigo.

“No, I -- I couldn’t.” But his stomach growled again, and Rogers made this stubborn sound through his nose that the Soldier almost thought he recognized for a split second.

“It’s your choice, but I’m only going to touch half of this food, and whether you eat the other half is your business.”

This was an unexpected complication. The Soldier’s meals were carefully rationed, but it was understood that he required extraordinary amounts of calories, so he’d rarely been denied food. His physical needs were provided for. There would be food waiting for him when he was extracted, although he didn’t know when that would be. He didn’t know how much food was there, but there was no way that it would be enough for him, let alone half, and in all likelihood probably wasn’t enough to sustain a man of Rogers’ size either if their goal was to weaken him. And Rogers was worried that he might be starving, that he might have been for some time, and he wanted to share his meager meal with him.

The Soldier very much doubted that this man could be evil. He wondered what their interest in him could be.

He didn’t want to take his food when he didn’t really need it, but as long as Rogers was steadfastly refusing to finish it, he might as well use it to his advantage and try to develop some camaraderie.

“Okay. Okay, sure. You gonna feed me?”

“I will.”

He sighed. “Alright. Drink something first, though. You sound like you’ve been gargling drywall.”

There was no humor in Rogers’ answering laugh. The Soldier wondered if his original assumption had been more true than he realized; maybe he had bitten someone’s dick and landed himself here. Still, he picked up the cup and took a brief sip. He waited a few minutes before drinking any more, but when nothing happened, he drank again.

“Your turn.”

The Soldier thought about the blood smeared over the floor. “Have some more.”

“It already feels about half as heavy as it did. Fair’s fair.”

He sighed again. Rogers was still waiting for his permission before he approached, an irony so acute that he could have laughed if it weren’t so ugly. He pushed that aside, thinking back over what he was supposed to know versus what he actually knew. Call Me Jimmy didn’t know that Rogers could practically see in the dark; for all he knew, Rogers was about to poke him in the face and spill broth in his lap.

“I’m over here,” he said. “You can put your hand on my chest as a guide.”

Rogers must have known that he could get it done without that, but he obliged. The Soldier wondered if Rogers was respecting his wishes or if he just thought maybe Call Me Jimmy missed human contact.

He’d never been this lost in his thoughts on a mission. Rogers’ hand startled him badly when it touched down across the center of his chest, large and gentle. He’d already begun to tune out the chains that clanged every time Rogers moved. The weight of it rested in his lap where it dangled from Rogers’ outstretched arm.

“It’s okay,” Rogers soothed. He switched to a more casual tone, probably trying not to embarrass him. “Can I leave this here?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Do you need a minute?”

“No, it’s fine. Let’s just do this.” His stomach growled again. He rolled his eyes.

Rogers reached out with his other hand and briefly touched his chin, as though to prove he knew where he was. He brought the cup to his lips very slowly, very carefully, and tipped only a small amount of broth into his mouth. It was cold, and barely more than water, but at least there was salt in it that Rogers could probably use. Rogers waited for him to swallow, paused, and poured some more, hand still on his chest. The warmth of his palm was beginning to bleed through the layers, confirming one of the Soldier’s suspicions: there was no way he wasn’t enhanced, not only with how warm he was, but how he could maintain it naked, in a cold room, after stresses like he was enduring.

When he closed his lips against the rim, Rogers pulled the cup away. “Looks like a roll and a protein bar on the menu.”

“Can’t go wrong with bread.”

Rogers tapped the roll against the tray. The solid thunk it made wasn’t encouraging. He tore it in half. When he brought it to the Soldier’s lips, it was wet and tasted like the broth. When he tore off a piece for himself, the Soldier could hear him chewing, and he knew that Rogers was saving the rest of the broth for him.

There was a strange intimacy to this moment that the Soldier couldn’t quite process, slipped through his fingers like water when he tried to grasp it. He’d submitted to a number of invasive medical procedures, was regularly exposed in front of countless personnel, and was forced to leave his basic needs to his handlers. He didn’t even give it thought most days. But sitting here in the dark, arms symbolically bound, being fed by this stranger, he felt exposed. He held all of the power in this room, at least between the two of them, and Rogers had no idea. But Rogers treated him with respect and dignity anyway.

“Why do you care so much?” he finally asked.

Rogers didn’t answer immediately, still chewing a hunk of dry bread. “I don’t like to see people go hungry.”

They’d just started on the protein bar when the lights went back on.

The Soldier’s first thought was that up close, Rogers was beautiful and disorienting at once. Just looking into his face reminded him of being outside a window with a flashbang going off inside.

His second thought was that Rogers looked like he felt the same way. His fingers froze on the Soldier’s lower lip where he’d been touching him slightly as he’d fed him a piece, but he yanked them away. They hadn’t spoken much while they ate, but there’d be a surprising easiness to it, and that had evaporated.

For a few seconds, he seemed vulnerable, and then his posture shifted again, becoming wary, defensive, bracing for attack, and then he looked at the Soldier’s bound arms and shook his head. He leaned back in to feed the Soldier some more. It didn’t escape his attention that Rogers had started giving him bigger pieces, but he didn’t want to argue about it again.

Since the talking part was clearly over, the Soldier studied Rogers’ face. There were nasty bruises there, too, and a stormy expression, with his blond hair pasted down over his forehead from sweat and congealed blood. From the moment he’d crossed the room, the smells of those fluids, and what the Soldier had left, had become unmistakable. This close, it was overwhelming. He said nothing. He tried to keep his eyes trained high enough that Rogers wouldn’t get self-conscious and clam up. It was obvious what had happened to him, and he had to know that, but maybe they could pretend for a while.

“Is something wrong that wasn’t already wrong before?” he finally asked.

“No. I just didn’t know what to expect.”

“I mean, you were expecting a human, right?”

Rogers snorted, holding out the last piece for him. With the lights on, he leaned forward and took it from between Rogers’ fingers himself, tongue glancing the side of his thumb.

Rogers stared at him while he rubbed his hands down his thighs. “Yeah, fair enough.”

He looked around like he was thinking about moving back to his previous spot. The Soldier’s gaze followed, lingering on the floor. Rogers coughed, and when the Soldier looked up, Rogers was watching him stare at the mess.

He didn’t comment, and neither did Rogers. He was still hungry, but his stomach had quieted; now that he knew Rogers was also enhanced, he was certain that he must be hungry, too.

Rogers stood. Maybe so that if he sat in it, at least neither of them had to look at it, and since he was still covered in it with no way to clean himself, what did it matter? Still, it bothered the Soldier, and he couldn’t quite decide why. It wasn’t guilt exactly, but there was an acute awareness that he was responsible for most of it.

It was obvious, when Rogers straightened, that he was in pain. Probably more than he let on. There were deep, symmetrical bruises on his knees and at intervals down his legs from the grooves in the platform. The Soldier was at eye level with his groin, up close with the damage he’d inflicted the previous night until Rogers turned and shuffled away, revealing his backside.

The Soldier looked away. He already knew what to expect there.

When he looked back, Rogers was staring at him again. He seemed to be drinking him in, but he avoided eye contact.

“Where are you from?” he finally asked.

The Soldier laughed. “Nowhere, really.”

“Moved a lot?”

“You could say that.”

His voice had improved after getting some liquids into him, though he had to still be on the edge of dehydration, and the Soldier found that he enjoyed listening to him speak. There was a cadence to his voice that intrigued him, broke the monotony and gray of this place. He sounded so normal. If the lights hadn’t come on, if the smell weren’t so powerful, it might have been possible to eventually forget where they were and what was happening.

“What do they want with you, Jimmy?”

He hesitated. What did they want with him? They wanted the machine that plowed through their enemies, created chaos to keep their order. “My body, mostly. They keep me around because of what it can do for them.”

Rogers’ face hardened. “So they…” He looked down at his lap, skirted his gaze around the platform, grimaced in disgust. He didn’t finish that thought. “Do they normally keep you in this room? Where did they have you before they brought you in?”

“I haven’t been in here much, actually. They keep me in another wing. Or did, I guess.” What plausible reason could they have to house hem together? “Maybe they’re running out of room. Or it could be punishment. My space isn’t so bad, compared to this. Could be a message. This is a room built for punishment.”

Rogers looked at him for a long time before he spoke again. “Do you think they’ll punish you in here?”

It took a moment for the Soldier to understand what he was asking.

“Ah, that. That’s not. That’s not really a punishment for me. It’s more … one of my duties.” And it was, even if it didn’t happen the way Rogers was imagining it, with Call Me Jimmy in his place on the platform.

He looked angry at that, but he didn’t answer. “Do they move you much?”

“I go where they send me.”

“So you’ve seen other parts of this compound?”

He had to be careful here not to give too much away. “Some. Nothing important.” He paused. “I haven’t seen the sun in a while. There are no windows.”

Before Rogers could answer, the room started filling with gas. Within seconds, they both slumped over, unconscious.

* * *

 

You did well, Soldier. He believes you.

He pushed his rations across his plate until his handlers looked at him in suspicion. Then he ate mechanically. He was hungry, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Rogers.

He spent the rest of the day training, until one of the officers pulled him aside and gave him a list of cells to visit. He nodded once, drying himself with a towel. This was quickly becoming less of a side task and more a regular part of his routine. It used to be that he wouldn’t have to visit a cell more than once -- once was enough to make their point. He made sure of it. Now they assigned him to this several times a week, every once in a while hitting the same cell.

When he was done, he went back to the lab where he slept, but the same officer stopped him.

You’re not finished. Come with me.

The officer led him back to the round room. He’d never had to visit this wrath on the same prisoner two nights in a row before. He didn’t see the straight jacket to maintain his cover. He looked to his superior for clarifying orders.

Don’t just stand there. You know what to do.

When the door opened, he stepped through it. The chains were taut, and Rogers was once again trapped in the center of the room, back on the platform, back to the door.

The hood was on. The Soldier knew now his eyes were open under it. His name was Rogers.

He knew what he had to do.


	2. Chapter 2

The Soldier slept fitfully. Typically, sleep was a binary state for him: he was either conscious or unconscious, and his cognizance of either was moot. Dreams had occurred in the past, but not frequently and not vividly. Not with clarity. Not enough to interfere with his task: to recharge to a satisfactory degree for further use. The cocktail of drugs that the lab technicians pumped into him every night ensured that.

The details began to bleed away from him almost as soon as he woke, an exothermic reaction to the familiar stimuli of the lab that left him cold with the blankness of his mind. The last detail he held onto, clinging as though he could dig his nails into his brain and hook it in place, was a fuzzy face, framed by scraps of torn metal and disappearing almost as quickly as it had appeared.

He waited for someone to notice that he was awake before he sat up, taking stock of his body in a way that normally either didn’t occur to him or he was deliberately careful to avoid. He observed enough to report damage to his handlers, then he shut it out again.

His penis was chafed. It was barely a blip on his radar, all things considered, an easily ignored discomfort, but the awareness of it slithered through him, greasy and heavy. His nightly rounds caused this sometimes, but not so acutely, and he knew why.

If this was what he’d done to himself, what state was Rogers in?

It didn’t matter. Not really. He’d never considered that side of the equation before, or it had been a while if he ever had. Of course, he’d never sat with his victims before, never learned their names and absorbed the sound of their voices with pleasure.

Never had a victim like Rogers.

He’d seen him three times now. Would they send him back in again? As the lamb or as the wolf?

It had been different last night, not just because he was ruining him again so soon after the first time, but the simple continuity. This was a recurring mission; he would visit him, dismantle him, as many times as it took, with whatever method he was told to employ. Starting his work with that knowledge hanging over him had agitated him, left him uncertain, and he’d taken that out on Rogers in exactly the way he’d been ordered: a perfect target, a vessel for his fulminant confusion. He couldn’t look at the man by the time he’d left. But it would be different. He would be in control again, and the more he learned, the less unsure he would be.

He was careful in his obedience, quick to respond and execute all commands he was given. He needed to be allowed to eat before he was brought to Rogers. If he appeared hungry, Rogers might want to feed him again, and being so close to the man was a distraction that he would perform better without.

He hid the relief that filled him when he was presented with a tray and told that he had five minutes.

Something in him had woken, something complex and unwieldy. The smells of the lab were sharper, the buzzing of the lights more prominent, the bland, nutrient-dense mass of food slightly less tasteless than usual. His skin prickled.

He used his five minutes of meal time and the ten of lab maintenance that followed to slip back under the surface, into the ebbing dark water, to be carried back out with the tide. By the time he was prepared and being shoved back into the room, his mind was as barren as a Siberian winter. He went totally limp as he hit the floor, going down hard and waiting for the door to close before he rolled to the side and maneuvered himself against the wall.

He didn’t look at Rogers right away, instead closing his eyes and breathing carefully into the silence between them. When he finally did, Rogers was staring at him with patient, naked interest. He was sitting up, but being careful to lean his weight onto his hip as much as he could, one leg bent behind him for support, trying to hide it to mixed results. It was hard to say whether the Soldier noticed because it was obvious or because he was looking for it, searching for evidence of what he’d done -- proof of the charade of Rogers’ wholeness and the Soldier’s innocence -- but if the only noticeable effect was that he had trouble sitting for a few days, he’d gotten off better than the Soldier might have feared.

Not feared. No. He wasn’t worried about Rogers. He just didn’t want to accidentally kill the man. Killing him wasn’t the mission. Killing him at this interval might mean consequences for the Soldier.

The smells had gotten stronger. In a few days, they’d be overwhelming. Would he be expected to comment, if he hadn’t been the one to put them there? Would it be strange not to notice? Is that what someone else in this position would do? Probably not. Was it unsympathetic to not ask? He thought about the times his arm had been damaged, the vulnerability and pain, and that raw feeling that filled his chest when the technicians addressed it, handled it. Acknowledging those places was like flayed skin exposed to air, drying and burning, a comparison he was certainly qualified to make.

He didn’t comment.

“Sorry I haven’t tidied up,” Rogers finally said. “Wasn’t expecting company.”

He narrowed his eyes. He’d heard dark humor among the agents and scientists, heard it enough to recognize when it was intended to provoke laughter, sometimes even to provoke laughter from him when agents grew disturbed by his stillness, but it had always struck a sour note that made his fingers itch to practice with his knife. He’d thought humor was outside his parameters, something he’d shed in his evolution process if he’d ever had it to begin with. Humor had no place in the Winter Soldier’s arsenal.

But Rogers smiled, lips quirked to one side just like the awkward cant of his hips, joking about his own degradation while he was still crooked from it; and there wasn’t anything funnier about that than the jokes he hadn’t laughed at before, but in this hopeless, powerless situation, it startled a quick, rusty laugh out of him.

It was the power, he realized dimly. The agents were powerful, mocking the weak, always. Rogers had no power, the butt of his own joke. The Soldier was somewhere in between, a gray place he occupied alone where he was simultaneously a force of nature capable of striking them down at any moment and a lackey unable to act under his own power. Sometimes they looked at him like a caged, fanged animal, some even like he was nitroglycerin, a thing to be handled with wariness and avoided whenever possible. But that wasn’t apt. He was a gun with no bullets until someone filled him up with potential and aimed him, a powerful tool in their armory capable of one thing only.

And Rogers was making jokes.

“Did you sleep?” It was a stupid question, a stupid thing to want to know, but an irrational part of him that he fiercely guarded was stuck on his broken dreams, how he could trace them back to his meeting with Rogers. It couldn’t be possible that he’d been affected more by their encounters than Rogers had. That made no sense. He’d been unharmed.

Rogers’ eyebrows twitched. “Dunno. Maybe.” He shifted, crossing his arms over his chest and pressing his shoulders harder into the wall. “I’ve slept worse places, though.”

That surprised the Soldier. His existence was far from enviable, but he was aware, at least, that it was far from typical. He was a unique beast, in unique circumstances. He knew that his perspective had skewed his bar for suffering very high, but it wasn’t lost on him that for most people, this would be beyond their worst nightmare. He was built for this. But there was a brightness in Rogers that fascinated the Soldier, an untouchable quality that seemed incongruous with all the ways he had certainly been touched so far. It was a far cry from the darkness that enveloped the Soldier.

What could Rogers have known that was worse than this?

He didn’t really want to know.

“Good,” he said.

The lights blinked out again.

Rogers sighed. “They’ve been doing that a while. Must be fans of the classics.”

The Soldier kept the smile from his mouth even though Rogers couldn’t see him. It wasn’t surprising that the purpose of the irregular lights hadn’t been lost on him. It was fairly standard.

“What do you suppose they want with you?” he ventured. It seemed reasonable enough. More reasonable than What will they do with you once they get what they want?

“No idea,” Rogers answered, a smooth lie. “But I know it’s no coincidence they’ve got us tossed in here together. They’re expecting something out of it.”

It seemed unwise to follow up on that observation. Instead, he asked, “Where are you from, then?”

The chains rattled. “Brooklyn. Ever been there?”

“Don’t think so,” he said, slow and uncertain. “That’s in New York?”

“Yeah. Just that you sound a little like a New Yorker.”

Shit. He must have been copying Rogers’ speech patterns. When he replayed their conversations, he realized that Rogers did have an accent discernible beyond “American”.

“Watched a lot of movies,” he covered.

“Yeah? Me, too. Trying to catch up. You could say I’ve been busy.”

Listening to him talk about time was a strange sensation; the Soldier felt ancient, and Rogers looked so achingly young.

The chains rattled again, and the Soldier thought Rogers might have given into temptation and lay down.

“City’s changed. Brighter. Louder. Coffee everywhere. Course, there’s always been lots of of people, so that’s not new.”

The Soldier leaned into his shoulder to rub away an itch from his nose, wishing his hands were free. “Not a people person?”

Rogers made a considering sound, a low note of thought. “I like people fine. Some more than others. Never been a social butterfly, though.”

“You seem pretty friendly.”

“Thanks for noticing.” His voice hardened, a sardonic note lacing through it. “Hard to stand on formality in circumstances like this.”

They lapsed into long stretches of silence, foregoing the prison cell small talk. Rogers’ breathing filled his ears, a very slight hitch to it, carefully concealed. It was measured enough that the Soldier knew his ribs were injured, every inhale and exhale timed and slow, none too deep.

He had questions. He had ideas on how to discover what made Rogers tick, how to lure Rogers’ secrets out of hiding. He had strategies.

What he wanted was to ask if his hip, the one Rogers wasn’t leaning on, was very painful. He’d clutched it in his preternaturally strong arm, fingers scraping bone so hard he’d been surprised to find he hadn’t broken the skin too badly. But the bruise was hideous, almost as dark as the bruising on his chest, snaking around his hip in a configuration that, while familiar, only barely resembled a human hand. He could have snapped it, crushed the bones until they crumbled between his fingers into a bloody paste and left the man misshapen and crippled.

He couldn’t ask. And, really, why would he? He didn’t even care much about his own pain. What would draw him to someone else’s?

He’d never had to stare at his work for so long, though. He was too efficient for that. Even in the darkness, he couldn’t stop looking in Rogers’ direction and thinking about it.

Rogers interrupted his jumble of thoughts. “So what do you know about this place?”

“It’s a fortress,” he immediately responded. He didn’t want Rogers getting any ideas.

This was going to be a dance. Rogers was smart but cared too much, unwilling to take what he must have concluded was the wisest course if it meant compromising his principles. He couldn’t stand suffering. That was a weakness. It was hard to say whether it was a note of gullibility available for exploitation or whether Rogers would take the plunge into fathomless water with his eyes wide open to the deception as long as it meant saving just one person. Or what he thought was a person. The Soldier had the feeling that Rogers would take the wolf in sheep’s clothes to spare it from the hunter, knowing full well what he was getting into.

So the question remained: if Rogers began to suspect him, would the Soldier be able to tell? Would it change anything? Or would Rogers angle for the humanity he thought must be trapped somewhere deep inside of him?

But he was getting ahead of himself, really. At the moment, Rogers appeared willing to trust him, at least as much as he’d be able to trust any random stranger in this situation after what he’d been through in the hands of the enemy.

Except he didn’t think it was random, he’d said. If he thought there was something inherently special about the Soldier, then the Soldier would just have to prove himself as ordinary as he could. He thought about the longer-term prisoners here; none made it very long, but a few had made it farther than most. They were obedient, pliant, largely silent and disinterested. They no longer expressed strong emotions of any kind. They weren’t terribly valuable, but neither had they proven themselves inconvenient enough to warrant termination, so they lived, such as it was. He was reminded, again, of his first meeting with Pierce. _We’re in a business of compassion_ , he’d said as he gestured for his subordinate to shoot a prisoner in the head. _That’s what this is all about, really. And you’ll enforce that mandate. Through our will, the world will be made whole again. And you will be in the vanguard of that movement._

“Hydra has a lot of those,” Rogers said. “Never had very much trouble breaking loose before.”

He’d implied before that he’d had run-ins with Hydra, and the Soldier was interested. Those worse places he’d slept, had they been rooms like this, maintained by the same organization? How far back did Rogers’ history with them go? He was sure that he would have remembered this man if he’d heard of him before, been briefed, even seen a file. Except those nagging, puzzling itches in his brain made him wonder. Maybe he had run into Rogers before. Maybe the sparks in his memory were from before his last procedure in the chair. That always left gaps in him. Rogers might not recognize him without the mask, without the uniform, without the murderous intent. A poisonous insect could very well be a leaf before it moved in that distinct way insects had and announced itself.

“You haven’t yet.” The hopelessness came unbidden. He was performing well. “What’s stopping you?”

“They’ve made some improvements to their protocols and equipment since our last round. But I’m patient.”

Rogers had to know that if Call Me Jimmy was a plant, it would be risky to openly admit to, let alone discuss, his intent to escape. So did that mean that the Soldier was giving him too much credit or just that he didn’t give a damn who knew?

“If I played along,” Rogers broke into his thoughts, “they wouldn’t believe me. They’d sooner expect me to grow wings than to roll over and not even try to escape.”

He tried not to startle at how unnervingly close Rogers had come to his train of thought. “So they know you pretty well?”

“We’re acquainted.”

He threw out some line to see where it floated. “A lot of guards,” he lied. “Constant surveillance. You must be important.”

“Guess that puts us in the same category.”

In a way, he wasn’t wrong.

He fed Rogers a few vague ideas about the security of the place, but his cover as a man who’d given up and become resigned to his surroundings made it plausible that he hadn’t given it much thought.

Rogers asked if he’d been held anywhere else before this, and a rushing sound filled his ears. The lights came back on. He didn’t answer.

Rogers changed the subject. The genuine disturbance the question had caused him, and Rogers’ acceptance of the effect it had on him, gave him ideas about how to redirect future conversations when he didn’t like where Rogers was heading.

The next several hours were spent alternately in silence or having Rogers explain the plots of movies he’d seen recently. It was surreal, but strangely comfortable.

His last thought, when the gas hissed into the room, was that it was too bad he’d have to wait to hear the end of the story. He’d have to ask Rogers to tell it again.

* * *

 

“He’s thinking about an escape.” The Soldier concentrated on the stainless steel table under him. It was so much easier when he was sitting up, not forced flat. He kept his outstretched arm still while they drew their blood samples. Something about the gas they’d used and intended to keep using; it didn’t really matter what it did to Rogers in the long-run, but they needed their asset at maximum functionality. Damage was not permissible.

Arrogant fool. Of course. And have you informed him this will not be possible?

“Yes.”

Have you asked any pertinent questions?

There was a scuff on the floor in the shape of a horseshoe. Horseshoes was a game. Had he played this game? “Pertinent to what?”

That’s not for you to know.

He almost shrugged. He almost asked what they expected from him if they refused to tell him what to look for.

“I want him to trust me,” he said. He should not trust me, he didn’t say. Wanted to say. The last thing he wanted was Rogers’ trust. He already knew it would be poisonous for both of them. Except for the very small, muted part of him that did, that wanted very much to somehow be found worthy in Rogers’ eyes and see what it would be like, just to see if there was a difference. “The only topic of importance he discusses is escape.”

You’ll deal with that, of course.

Of course he would.

* * *

 

More than a week passed with very little deviation from the routine. Call Me Jimmy would invite Rogers’ attention under false pretenses, Rogers would treat him like a human being worthy of acknowledgment and interest, and the Soldier would return to brutalize him in the night. Rogers was careful about what he said, but equally careful to not appear suspicious. The lights would die and flare again at random. Sometimes a tray would appear and Rogers would feed them both. Twice Rogers apologized, turned around, and relieved himself into the drain in the floor. The Soldier looked away, timed the stream to monitor for signs of increasing dehydration, said nothing.

There was an art to this. Rogers had managed to gracefully evade direct questions without appearing to do so, reveal little personal information while still coming across as accessible and warm, and carefully redirect topics he didn’t like without relying on lies. Or obviously relying on them, at any rate. It was breathtaking, really, in its skill and subtlety.

The Soldier’s excursions into the real world were mostly limited to two scenarios: quick, ugly kills, and longer, expert hunts. The protocols were different for each. The chaotic, brutal missions didn’t require much preparation, so he was handled less and was afforded the capacity to think between locations, but it was always dark and he couldn’t stray. The longer ones were worse in some ways, better in others. He was prepared thoroughly for these missions, drilled and trained until they could reach into his mind and find what they were looking for. The chair was integral to these preparations; it left him queasy, left him empty and waiting, and though he retained the ability to stalk and take down a target, had several days to himself where he could breathe real air and see grass and be around people who were neither prey nor handlers, his mind remained trapped in the rigors of its programming. He understood why they did this; armor for his mind was as valuable as armor for his body, and as necessary. But it was more disorienting than the straightforward missions, left him no room in his body for thoughts of his own to savor being outside and around people. He would remember later, back on his cot in the lab, like an errand he’d forgotten to run -- a comparison that would confuse him because he did not perform errands of any kind, nor did he forget orders, but it nagged him all the same every time.

Sometimes, though, he would be required to perform humanity, never for long and never too convincingly, just enough to slip into place and do what he needed. He would be required to watch and absorb and apply just enough to corrode their defenses. He kept these pieces for future use, reminders of what people were like outside of these walls.

He regurgitated these ideas and experiences in what he thought was a convincing way, a head fake toward reassurance that he was like Rogers. He practiced having opinions as he lay down to sleep, and the next day, he would share them with Rogers as though they were his own. Rogers would shamelessly ask openly probing questions like, “Where do they take you when you’re not here?” and the Soldier would turn timid and lie, “Not far. A few corridors away. I keep my head down.”

They did not discuss the room. They did not discuss the steadily-increasing damage visible on Rogers’ body, the healing that was beginning to slow, or the crust of blood that thickened every day. He cataloged the stains and smears because in the vacuum of this space, they did not change. They were as resistant to time as bootprints on the moon. They were hot and red when he drew them into being as the Soldier, oxidized to a dull brown by the time he returned as Call Me Jimmy.

On the sixth day, as he was shoved into the room, his gaze landed on fresh red staining the floor.

Rogers was on his side, one arm wrapped around his abdomen, the other pillowing his head. He didn’t acknowledge the Soldier.

Had someone else been in to do the Soldier’s work? Were they doubting him already? Irritation bloomed, a molten trickle between his shoulder blades that he itched to shake off. The irritation made it easier to suppress the rage -- he wasn’t angry that someone might have touched Rogers, just that his mission was being interfered with, just that his abilities were being called into question. He wasn’t concerned. But it wasn’t like he could ask about it -- how could he possibly know that that blood wasn’t meant to be there without tipping his hand to the rest of it?

Rogers pushed himself up heavily. The Soldier watched the lengthy process it took for him to decide how to sit. He avoided sitting on his injured ass but seemed tired of lying down, tried to rest on his knees and rocked back as if he’d been burned -- it could have been the pain from the deep and constant bruising in his legs, but from the pinched look on his face, the Soldier suspected it was mental. He’d been forced to his knees too many times already and couldn’t stand it a second longer than he had to. He finally settled on his coccyx, back curved awkwardly against the wall to accommodate the unconventional position.

Rogers was slow to begin his usual attempt at intelligence-gathering and idle chatter, but eventually he did, and the Soldier obliged, playing along as if there weren’t fresh blood in his peripheral every time he looked in Rogers’ direction. As if it weren’t spurring possibility after possibility in his mind.

He realized, halfway through a retelling of an action/thriller with Rogers’ pithy commentary interspersed, that he’d had more complete thoughts since Rogers’ arrival than he could remember having in the previous month. The days were distinct from one another instead of sliding together. It was alarming.

It took him a few heartbeats to notice that Rogers had stopped talking, had sighed. He realized why almost immediately: he’d been staring at the floor while his thoughts churned.

“A week of rations like that and not enough water’ll do that to a guy,” he said dryly.

The Soldier didn’t understand the implication at first, or the cagey look on his face, until he abruptly did. No one else had been here. He coughed. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

“Hey, you don’t run the kitchen.”

The unspoken _not your fault_ rankled him down to his toes. Of course it was his fault. Rogers just didn’t know.

But there were ways to undo the man without leaving his body unable to function within a stone’s throw of normal working order. They’d told him to do his work and left it up to his interpretation. That left him some room to reinterpret. He considered his options.

“You said there were four sequels?”

* * *

 

The Soldier procured lubricant. He’d gone out on a limb for this one, explaining to the lab technician that the chronic chafing on his penis was becoming a distraction in the field. His heart had jumped in his throat as he’d waited, and then the man had laughed and said that there was something to be said for reliable constants, and wasn’t it something that deep down, the Winter Soldier was just like every other man after all. He’d nodded and smiled, taking the bottles with an utterance of gratitude that sat heavy on his tongue like iron.

Not knowing when he’d be able to resupply, he was sparing in its application, using only enough to prevent injury but not significantly reduce discomfort. For the receiver, at any rate -- it did feel substantially better for him, but that was entirely beside the point. Of course, the easier it was for him, the sooner it was over for them both. He deliberated only briefly on whether to use any of it on his other duties, but his decision was easy; most of them only got a visit from him once in a while, not every damn night. Rogers needed every drop the Soldier could get.

He hid the small bottle with his ammunition. Sometimes they examined or serviced his weapons, but they never checked his ammo unless he asked for more, and since he brought his tools with him every night, this ensured that it would remain on him when he needed it. He stashed the other in the frame of his cot just in case.

The first time, he probed gently with his flesh hand, slick and slow, feeling for damage and finding some noticeable spots that made Rogers shudder. A normal man might have been very sick by now, but Rogers’ constitution left him merely incredibly uncomfortable. It would have been wise to leave him be for several days at least, but that was all the leeway he was going to get.

He thought about the ice cream parlor with the bizarre flavors Rogers had been telling him about while he pounded away no more gently than before.


	3. Chapter 3

Rogers didn’t eat his provided meals for a few days, but he didn’t insist that the Soldier consume them either. He ignored them completely, save for the cup, and by the time the Soldier returned for his evening visit, the trays would be gone. The Soldier hoped that when some of the pain receded, he’d eat again.

He’d been losing weight almost from the beginning. The Soldier laid his hands over Rogers’ hips every time he found him on the platform, feeling for the shape of his bones and the heft of his muscle. Every change in the dips and valleys was noted. He resolved on the third day of his meal avoidance to convince Rogers to eat somehow.

Once, with his fingers tracing Rogers’ hipbones, his side flexed violently. He did it again, on the other side, and the same thing happened, and in morbid fascination, he continued. He’d gotten more reaction from mapping the sensitive, ticklish spaces on his body than he had inflicting any number of pains. There was a lesson there. He kept at it for a while, pleased to have found an effective method that wouldn’t leave marks. Of course, some marks had to be left, so they would know he’d done what he was supposed to, but the battleground wasn’t really Rogers’ body. It was in his mind.

He’d take whatever path he could to convince him to stay down.

He’d thought he was making an impression for a few days, with Rogers growing more sullen and asking fewer questions during their days together, until he picked one that stopped the Soldier in his tracks.

“What do you know about a hitter with an advanced prosthetic arm?”

He could have laughed. What did he know?

“Not as much as some people,” he said. It was true enough. “They call him the Winter Soldier.”

“The Winter Soldier,” he said, weighing the name. His focus was unnerving.

The Soldier feigned surprise. “Have you seen him?”

Rogers bristled. “I think we’ve met,” he said tightly.

“How do you know it’s advanced? What does it look like?”

“I’ve been around a lot of people with prostheses, seen cutting-edge technology. This thing is precise. Functionally indistinguishable except that it’s bigger, stronger, and feels like metal. That’s a tall order.”

He filed that information away, but couldn’t help noting something else. “Feels like?” It was cruel, digging at him that way, but the Soldier wasn’t here to be kind. He had to see how he would react. “When did you get the chance to feel up the ghost?”

He stiffened, narrowing his eyes. The answer was obvious, so he didn’t dignify that with a response.

The Soldier tried to look sheepish to walk it back. He wasn’t sure if it was effective, but it was worth a shot. “He’s a living weapon. Most people who see him, it’s the last thing they ever do.”

“Is he high up in the organization or is he contracted?”

The Soldier laughed. “He’s a pet. He does what he’s told.” He turned inward, angling his body away to signal the end of his willingness to have this discussion.

The lights went out. Another tray slid under the door. Rogers offered it to him, but when he didn’t answer, Rogers broke his hunger strike and ate in silence.

* * *

 

Rogers continued to press him for information on the Winter Soldier, and he fed him bits and pieces, mostly irrelevant things, before shutting him down each time. Eventually Rogers stopped asking. He suspected that he’d left him with the impression that he, too, had been wounded by the Winter Soldier. As ludicrous as it was, he wasn’t even sure he could convincingly deny it if asked.

They got past the awkwardness of the Soldier’s misstep. Rogers didn’t seem to hold it against him, at any rate. He grew used to the rhythm of his visits. Rogers grew more haggard.

At one point, with forced casualness, Rogers asked whether he knew if they were spending their days or their nights together. The Soldier wasn’t always aware of time and often didn’t know whether it was day or night when he’d been kept in the lab too long, but he was certain that they were intentionally disorienting Rogers and wanted to keep him off-balance as much as possible. The lights went on and off at random, his meals were erratically scheduled, and he couldn’t know how long he’d been unconscious every time they knocked him out. Maybe part of him was trying to deduce when he was being assaulted exactly, but the bigger part, the more likely part, was that he was losing track of time, and it disturbed him. He didn’t know how long he’d been trapped in that room. He couldn’t.

The Soldier apologized for not being able to answer, and Rogers shook his head.

* * *

 

They finally let him back out into the field. He was crouched on a rooftop all night before dropping onto the fire escape and slipping up the stairwell. It was over within minutes after that. By the time he got back to his handlers and debriefed in the lab, the sky was just tinging orange across the horizon. They hurried him into the building. Another ten minutes and he’d have witnessed the sunrise.

He thought they’d strip him down, log his weapons, address his injuries, and send him to his cot, but instead they directed him to the round room. His nostrils flared before he could tamp it down. The agent leading him down the hall took no notice.

He breathed deeply before stepping across the threshold, eyes on the floor while they closed the door behind him. When he finally looked up, Rogers was just where he’d expected him. He ached with fatigue, but he hadn’t visited any other prisoners tonight for a change, so it was quick work to get himself ready and slick and plunge ahead. He moved single-mindedly, briskly, until he finished, pulling out quickly and then standing by the door to wait. He waited for some time before he realized that they weren’t going to let him leave until they were satisfied.

He sighed , rubbing his hand across his eyes until stars erupted in his vision.

He approached Rogers again.

* * *

 

They fed him immediately upon exiting the round room. He ate ravenously. Dealing with Rogers was beginning to affect his appetite, but after all of the energy he’d expended since his last meal, he needed the calories. He had no expectations this time. They might allow him to shower, they might allow him to sleep, they might need him for any number of tasks. His preference was irrelevant.

When they presented him with the jacket no more than an hour after he’d left Rogers strung up and dripping, he bit his tongue to silence the whine of frustration trying to emerge.

In. Down. On the floor. Roll to his knees, sit back, scoot to the wall. He didn’t look at Rogers immediately. When he did, Rogers was staring at his wrists, twisting the cuffs around his forearms as much as he could to try to rub them. He rolled his shoulders, flexed his legs and fingers. He’d probably only been released from the platform in the last half an hour or so. The Soldier had no knowledge of the protocol used, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they gassed him for that as well. Most likely, anyway. Half the time he’d wake up alone with new aches, half the time he’d wake up bound and be forced to wait.

Of course, he was waiting for the Soldier’s arrival either way.

So this was Rogers’ routine, then. He would stretch and give himself a cursory once-over.

“You’re early,” he said. There was something off in his voice. It wasn’t shaking, wasn’t rattled, but there was a note there that wasn’t normally present. Maybe he was used to the extra time to collect himself, and Call Me Jimmy had caught him off-guard.

He tried and failed to shrug, slumping further down the wall instead. “They send me, I go.”

Rogers finally looked up, eyebrows drawing together and mouth pulling into a frown. His voice was cold with anger when he spoke. “You’re hurt.”

Oh. Right. His tongue snaked out to prod at his bruised lip. His eye throbbed. He’d forgotten about those. They didn’t matter; they hadn’t slowed him down, and he’d accomplished the objective. “It’s fine.”

Rogers studied him, looking him up and down with fresh eyes, the strangeness of the last few minutes erased. He wanted to say something. He was biting it back, but he must have thought his captors, “their” captors, had beaten him. It was a very reasonable assumption, and it would be easy to move past. It wasn’t like there was anything either one could do about it, and if he indicated that he didn’t want to talk about it, Rogers would abide. Besides, Rogers wasn’t one for deep feelings talks, anyway. Just practical details and tactics.

Neither was particularly interested in talking. Considering the long game his superiors were counting on, one fruitless session didn’t amount to much. It was even easier to wait silently once the lights flickered out.

Eventually, though, shortly after the lights had reemerged, the consequences of the Soldier’s abbreviated maintenance routine became difficult to ignore. His bladder was extremely full and protesting painfully. He could ignore discomfort, could make it disappear to the back of his awareness, but there didn’t seem to be any point in trying, and in all honesty, the longer he was around Rogers, the more difficult it was to do. It was getting harder to keep still.

That got Rogers’ attention. “Do you need help? Is something wrong?”

He shook his head. “No, just nature taking its course. I’ll live.”

Rogers pressed his lips together. He glanced around the empty room. “If you need a hand…”

The Soldier froze. Was Rogers really offering to open his pants, hold his penis, and help him piss? The full farce of it would be lost on Rogers, of course, ignorant as he was to the situation, but bitter laughter welled up in the Soldier’s throat and died before it made a sound.

“I understand if you’d rather not,” he continued. He chuckled darkly. “Believe me, I do. But you can do some real damage ignoring that one. How long has it been?”

He squirmed, sharp jabs reminding him that it had been a full day since he’d last relieved himself. He had strict orders not to actively damage himself or cause damage through negligence.

“Okay.” He bit the inside of his cheek as he rolled to his feet. “Fine. Sure.”

He knelt beside the drain and waited. Rogers turned slowly, blinking as though he couldn’t believe he was actually doing this, but then his face smoothed into neutrality. The Soldier held his breath as Rogers reached for his fly. There was a tense, uncertain moment where he childishly thought some great secret would be revealed, like Rogers could possibly recognize his penis this way, or maybe that Rogers’ tolerance for them in general had worn thin.

Nothing like that happened. He was careful but efficient as he firmly took the Soldier in hand and pointed him. He’d been holding it for so long that it took a few moments to get started, but when he did, his vision practically whited out, first with pain, and then with relief. He let his head fall back, sighing deeply.

Rogers was, for the most part, being polite and not staring at the dick in his hand, but he had to look to see what he was doing after he gave him a shake and went to tuck him away, and his gaze lingered for a few seconds then. The Soldier had realized early on in this arrangement that Rogers absorbed information like a sponge, and just as quickly. He wouldn’t be surprised if Rogers had memorized it already. Probably couldn’t help it. It wasn’t like there was anything to do here. Apart from bouts of suffering, he was probably bored out of his mind.

The moment Rogers had the button on his pants done up, he pulled his hands away, ineffectually wiping them down his thighs as though that made a difference, and sat back. The Soldier pushed to his feet and returned to his place across the room. The stark incongruity of Rogers’ constant nudity, compared to how the Soldier was covered thoroughly from the neck down every time, suddenly struck him. He was probably freezing constantly, for one thing. But the inequality was obvious, and Rogers had to have noted it. If asked, he could always offer a vague explanation of privileges, suggest that he cooperated just enough for certain basics and maybe Rogers could do the same.

There was no way he’d go for it. Rogers’ will was titanium. Maybe they could force him to bend, but it would take more than a pair of pants to make him crack.

* * *

 

The Soldier was a skilled pickpocket. His missions these past few years had leaned harder and harder on brute force and chaotic violence, but in his early days, he’d been known to employ subtlety. He was rusty, but muscle memory was the only kind that never strayed too far from his grasp.

It took three lab techs passing by before his hand came back with a pack of gum sandwiched carefully between his pointer and middle fingers. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants.

Rogers already had the cup in his hand when the Soldier landed in the room. He was watching the door intently, but there was no way he’d see anything; the guard was careful to remain out of sight lines and the hallway was very dark compared to the bright room. He was effectively blind to anything beyond, with the door shutting long before his eyes could possibly adjust.

They continued the patter to which they’d been growing accustomed. Rogers angled for intel, backed off, described movies and interesting sights; the Soldier offered what he could, lied even more, and listened intently, asking questions of his own about the outside world. Rogers sipped from the cup, offering it up but not pressing the issue when the Soldier declined. He’d already eaten most of his meager meal, picking at it throughout their discussion.

“C’mere,” the Soldier finally ventured. Something thrummed through him, almost like adrenaline but neither bitter nor unpleasant. “I have something for you.”

Rogers looked skeptical, but he gamely obliged. The Soldier met him halfway, shimmying over before he leaned back into the wall and nodded toward his waist.

Rogers waited. The Soldier suppressed the sparks dancing in his chest.

Excitement. He was excited. That’s what it was. What the hell was that about? He just wanted to give the man a pack of gum. He hadn’t been able to brush his teeth in weeks. There were several reasons that Rogers might have felt disgust, but this one the Soldier could offer a balm for.

It was the thrill of getting away with something unexpected. That was it. He hadn’t been ordered to steal anything, but there was no standing order against it, so he’d found a glimpse of freedom in the gray area between. Rogers had nothing to do with it.

“What is it?”

Rogers was growing tenser by the second. The Soldier wondered if it was the surprise of the situation or if the giddiness of the Soldier was off-putting. He was out of practice, at least, if he’d ever known how to begin with.

“My waistband.”

Rogers’ eyebrows just about shot up to his hairline. “Why?”

“Go ahead.”

Rogers leaned back, bodily pulling away and mentally closing shutters. The Soldier replayed the last couple of minutes in his head and realized what that had sounded like.

He snorted. “No, I hid something there. Besides, what’s the big mystery? You’ve already had your hand down my pants. Thanks for that, by the way.”

Rogers’ expression didn’t change, but he reached down anyway. The chain smacked heavily into the Soldier’s crotch as Rogers’ fingers curled into his waistband, feeling around in shallow, exploratory dips like he was searching quadrant by quadrant.

He came away with the gum, slightly softened from the Soldier’s body heat, and turned it over in his hands a few times. He looked up at the Soldier, posture finally relaxing. There was a strange softness to the set of his jaw.

He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t going to explain to Rogers that he was offering up a token of humanity to remind him of his own, however trivial it was, or that he understood the mind-numbing boredom and emptiness and loneliness that was a torture in its own right. He figured Rogers knew. In any case, this was a subtle art not unlike the pickpocketing itself: we’re in this together now, it said, and you can trust me.

Rogers’ fingers curled around the pack. Slowly, contemplatively, he asked, “You stole this?”

He nodded, suppressing the smile that threatened to stretch his lips painfully.

“If they catch you, they’ll punish you, right?” He looked pointedly at the healing bruise on the Soldier’s face. “Why risk it?”

His answer was mostly theoretical, but it came easily. “Sometimes it’s nice to have things.”

It wasn’t like he could say that he’d done it just for Rogers. It was easier to sell that he’d seen his chance and taken it, then waited to share his prize with someone who understood.

Rogers slid two sticks out of the sleeve. He nimbly unwrapped one, holding it between index middle and forefinger just like the Soldier had lifted it, like he knew, and held it out. The Soldier immediately leaned forward to catch it in his teeth. It was a test, probably. Rogers was being polite, sure, but some part of him probably needed to see the Soldier try it first.

The Soldier had more work to do, but he’d get there.

After the Soldier had flipped it back into his mouth and chewed it for a few seconds, cool mint bursting over his palate, Rogers opened the second one and laid it across his tongue. The Soldier stared at it for a long time, long enough that it must be unnerving, but Rogers paid it no mind, drawing it back to close his mouth. When he hollowed his cheeks to suck hard, the Soldier knew he’d been right.

Rogers could hide nothing in this sterile, bare room, so he tucked the pack back into the Soldier’s pants, fingers quicker and more sure this time. They chewed in silence for a bit, indulging in this dangerous pleasure.

“What else could you steal?” Rogers asked suddenly. He’d perked up considerably at this new information, likely already cataloging it away. He was energized.

Of course he was. The Soldier should have known. He had demonstrated a useful skill, a willingness to push the boundaries of his obedience somewhat, and an ability to find supplies. Probably also that he had slightly more freedom than he’d initially appeared. He didn’t regret his decision -- he couldn’t, watching Rogers run his tongue over his teeth and relax a little -- but his error would need to be rectified. He’d made himself too valuable, made escape more tempting and seemingly achievable. He’d have to bring Rogers back down to earth. He’d have to do it tonight.

He pushed it out of mind for as long as he could. There was nothing he could do about it yet.

“Not a lot. They don’t give me access to very much. I don’t know where they keep anything.”

Rogers didn’t seem deterred by that, or he hid it well if he was. He asked a few more questions, but even he was content, at the moment, to just allow himself something nice, allow Call Me Jimmy his forbidden fruit.

A memory slithered through his brain, wrapped its tendrils around his thoughts. It crept up on him slowly, like he’d approach an enemy, so that by the time he’d noticed it, he was squarely in its hold. The flavor, the act of chewing it, maybe even the sharing itself -- it was hard to say what triggered it, exactly. All he knew was the feeling of falling that stole his breath, a song on his lips that he’d been known to hum before when he was alone.

The Soldier could perform humanity, but he didn’t often feel it. What the hell was so special about a pack of gum, anyway?

Rogers’ grin as he chewed, almost like an answer, stayed with him the rest of the day, long after they’d spit their used up gum into the drain and been gassed into unconsciousness.

* * *

 

He was getting too used to Rogers. Too comfortable with him. When he came for him unbound, with Rogers held still and mute, he found himself thinking about Rogers’ voice, what he would say, what he would sound like. He could hear it so clearly in his head as he worked.

He knew it when he appealed to an officer to bathe the prisoner. They laughed, turning him away, and he backed down, appearing appropriately shamed. But he tried again with a different officer another day, and another after that. He tried next to leave Rogers so filthy, so grotesquely coated in various fluids, that even the technicians who presumably went in to chain him in place and pull the hood over his face wouldn’t want to handle him. All attempts failed. Every day he’d return to find Rogers trying to scrape away the layers from the night before, using part of his limited and erratically supplied water to clean himself.

But Rogers had gotten under his skin when he’d asked, in a rare low moment, “Why do you never say anything about how, every time we meet, I’m covered in…”

He couldn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. He’d assumed that Call Me Jimmy was being similarly abused, but he didn’t walk around naked with dried come all over his thighs, forced to ignore it just to maintain some composure and make an attempt at dignity. It wasn’t the same.

But he was right: of course it was obvious what was happening. He couldn’t have missed it. So all he could offer for answer was a confused, “Did you want me to say anything?”

The answer was no, of course, but Rogers had clearly been bottling that one up for a while. He didn’t seem better, exactly, after acknowledging the elephant in the room, but it seemed important nonetheless.

But it had gotten to him. The stress Rogers had tried to hide, the shame finally peeking through the veneer.

Finally, he convinced a gullible lab tech that his programming demanded cleanliness and was provided with a hose under the slot in the door to just do it himself if it annoyed him so much.

He recognized the hose. It was far too powerful to be used on anything living; its normal use was in the transport bay for vehicles. He thought carefully before he turned it on, pointing it at the wall behind the drain and covering it with his metal hand. The pressure was strong enough that he jolted at first despite bracing himself for it. He experimented, trying to temper the force and the flow rate until he had something that wouldn’t injure Rogers, giving the floor a good rinse while he was at it. He washed him all over, ungentle but thorough, as the water beating against his palm vibrated up into his shoulder. He aimed it with almost full force a few times to make it clear that this was for the mission and not for Rogers’ comfort -- the upturned soles of his feet, under his arms, vulnerable places. He slowed the water to a trickle when he held it to Rogers’ backside.

Rogers’ couldn’t help reacting to this new stimulus, jerking every time the water found a new target, but here he stilled, his fear palpable in a way that it normally wasn’t.

He finished quickly, dropped the hose, and left Rogers dripping wet. He was shivering when the Soldier pressed into him.

He knew that he’d have to make up for this insolence, but when he saw Rogers the next day, deeply bruised but sitting a little straighter, he knew he’d do it again the moment he could.


	4. Chapter 4

It would have been easier if they’d told him to kill Rogers. He could do that, ironically, as easy as breathing. It didn’t require any thought. He would have done it already, dispassionate and brutal, just like he fucked. It would have been over, and the dam would have held, and he wouldn’t feel this way. He wouldn’t feel at all.

But they hadn’t, and this was rapidly spiraling out of his control. He told himself constantly that Rogers needed sense beaten into him to maintain the shaky status quo, that it had to be him, that he’d do it this next time, and every time he pulled back. Every time he failed to do what needed to be done. It did neither of them any favors. If he didn’t do it, someone else would.

Rogers had planted so many thoughts, though. So many ideas were taking root in the long-barren ground of his mind, of his conscience, and it ached, stung, overwhelmed him. Why were the other prisoners being held? What had they done? Were they really so dangerous? If he’d been so wrong about Rogers deserving this fate, maybe he was wrong about the others, too. Maybe even the people he killed on his missions. How did he know they deserved the Winter Soldier’s violence?

He couldn’t. He was never provided with that information, and now was entirely the wrong time to start asking those sorts of questions. To question anything. He was so far off the path.

He kept his reports matter-of-fact, emphasizing Rogers’ humiliation and discomfort, how he spoke less and less of escape and, at times, spoke little at all. How sometimes he’d drift and seem lost in his head. He didn’t tell them that when that happened, the Soldier would carefully draw him back out with questions of the outside world, theories about books he’d described, anything to wake his soul.

He wasn’t sleeping much. The Soldier had told him that he should at least try to sleep while the lights were out, but Rogers didn’t seem ready to make himself even more vulnerable around him just yet, even if he didn’t come out and say it. Maybe it was just for the control. He couldn’t control when they knocked him out or his predicament when he woke up, but as long as he was awake, he wanted to be aware of what was happening. Only nothing was happening. There was no stimulation aside from his conversations with Call Me Jimmy.

The Soldier was lost in his own thoughts, considering his options while he worked, when Rogers abruptly slumped in his chains, head lolling forward. The Soldier paused. His brow wrinkled as he reached over Rogers’ shoulder to feel his pulse; Rogers gave no reaction to the Soldier’s hand on his throat. He quickly circled around to his front. Rogers was taking shallow breaths, but the Soldier suspected he’d lost consciousness. He cast a furtive glance toward the door, but his hand was already moving.

He undid the closure across his throat and carefully peeled the hood up past his mouth and nose. He waited with his hand in front of Rogers’ face, barely feeling the air move. Thought about pressing his mouth to Rogers’ and forcing a few breaths into him. But giving him some breathing room, unobstructed by the dense hood, seemed to have done the trick. His breathing improved quickly.

The Soldier got back to work, keeping an eye out for Rogers regaining consciousness. When he started to come around, not long before the Soldier finished, he adjusted the hood back into place before Rogers could even think to make a sound.

Rogers’ razor-sharp hipbones bit into his palms under his clenched hands as he came.

* * *

 

He could have passed out for any number of reasons. The Soldier chose one to address. Rogers would get confused sometimes, not enough to exploit for information, but enough to be notable. Between the deprivation and the pain, it was understandable, but the Soldier hoped that it was nutritional and not neurological. He’d seen it before, and he shuddered remembering it.

He snuck one of his nutritional sludge drinks out of the lab. Palming it up into his sleeve was easy, and the techs had grown so used to his presence that they no longer checked his tray. It was thick, gray, and tasteless, but it would keep Rogers alive if he could get it into him.

He couldn’t risk giving it to Rogers outright. Not now, with the officers so mistrustful and Rogers still hatching plans. It might even engender suspicion in Rogers. Maybe later, if there was a later, but definitely not now.

He’d stashed it with the lube for safekeeping, and as he stepped into the room, he realized what he had to do. He opened the tube first. Rogers was conscious and thrashing when he pulled the hood up past his mouth, feral beyond words now that he had his chance. Once he’d grabbed his face and tipped his head back, he made quick work of pouring the concoction down his throat. With his nose pinched shut, Rogers had no choice but to swallow. The Soldier rushed to wipe away all traces of whatever had spilled, yanking his hand back when Rogers tried to bite and slapping him instead, and briskly pulled the hood back into place.

Satisfied, he tucked the drained tube back into his gear and opened his pants.

What would Rogers have wanted to say to him, anyway, if he hadn’t been blinded by rage and fear?

* * *

 

It wasn’t enough. It probably helped, but he couldn’t rely on that method. It was inefficient, and he probably wouldn’t get away with it for long. He had to appeal again. But he thought he could make a better case this time.

“He’s passing out while I work,” he said, staring straight ahead. “How can I teach him obedience if he’s unconscious? He needs to understand. I’ll get what you need, but he needs to feel what I do.”

What we need, Soldier. We share a common goal, don’t we?

“Of course. And I’ll break him.”

And what do you propose we do?

He swallowed carefully. Kept his face blank, his body loose. Unthreatening. Unchallenging. They were mocking him, but they didn’t expect him to notice, so he might as well proceed as if they were genuine. “Increase his caloric intake. Just enough to keep him alert. I’ll take care of the rest.”

* * *

 

The following morning, Rogers’ jaw was black and blue where the Soldier had gripped him. A lurid mark painted his cheek where the Soldier had struck him. He was alert, though. Irritable, but alert.

Perversely, he ignored the tray when it came. The Soldier’s lips pinched together. So they were back to this. The nutritional goo packed much greater value than what the tray held, but that wasn’t the point. He had to eat. Maybe before he’d been in too much pain to be able to, but this was purely willful.

Ironically, after sacrificing part of his regimen for Rogers’ sake, he’d now have to take some of it back just to convince Rogers to knock this off.

“Hungry?” he asked. He kept his voice casual, but inside he was all white-hot pinpricks. The other shoe would drop any day now, the consequences would emerge to likely swallow them both, and in the meantime, he had to keep Rogers alive. He had to prove that he was in control of the situation yet still subordinate to the organization. And it would only work if Rogers would stop playing games. He had no idea what was on the line.

“Not really.”

“I am,” he lied. “Give me a hand?”

Rogers lugged himself closer, stormy thoughts rolling across his face like a projector screen, and sat heavily beside him. When he leaned over to hook a corner of the tray and tug it closer, the Soldier finally glanced at the rations, not expecting much.

They’d nearly doubled.

He almost choked on his own spit. He’d done it. They’d backed down and provided what he needed, and Rogers’ situation might be half a percent less dire.

There was no way this was without consequence, though. Maybe there would be no punishment, but there would be compromise. This was a loan he was taking out, and they would want collateral.

He contemplated what form their retribution might take while Rogers fed him, and as he’d suspected, Rogers didn’t make it more awkward than it had to be by abstaining. He split the food evenly, pausing at first to stare at it.

“Looks like more, huh,” he said. He tried to sound pleased yet surprised, but it came out distracted.

Slowly, suspiciously, Rogers replied, “Yeah. Looks like.” But he ate, and that was the important thing.

When he returned to the lab, his cot had been replaced. They’d left him a thin bedroll on the concrete floor. If that was all they did, he’d be lucky. Still, he deflated slightly. The spare lubricant was still hidden in the frame. Now it was gone. He would run out soon if he wasn’t careful.

One step forward, two steps back.

* * *

 

The Winter Soldier could withstand great pain, but he wasn’t in the habit of letting himself be stabbed.

The wound barely fazed him, but it troubled him how sloppy he’d gotten. He’d been distracted, wondering if this target was who the agent said he was, if he’d done what they were saying he had. When the knife flashed in his peripheral, he’d barely noticed.

How long could he keep going like this? He’d eliminated the target, but it would be noticed soon that his injury reports had increased.

The pain in his side when they strapped him into the jacket was intense. He’d had worse, of course. Regardless, he tried to land on his back instead this time when they knocked him to the floor. It still stuttered his breath in his throat and lanced fire up his trunk.

He found his equilibrium before he slid back to the wall. He’d been stabbed before. Had it hurt this much? He didn’t remember the pain so acutely, didn’t think he’d noticed it this much then. He was feeling more than he had in years, and he suspected it all came down to Rogers. And it was frightening.

“You’re hurt,” Rogers said, and it was pointless every time he announced that, but especially frustrating that day.

“What makes you say that?” he breathed, voice tighter than he’d been aiming for. He’d been able to play it off to the lab techs, and according to them, it wasn’t even that serious. What the hell was it about Rogers that broke him wide open like this?

The look Rogers gave him could stop a team of oxen in its tracks. “I know pain.” He shifted, crossing his legs and laying his forearms across his knees. “Plus, you’re bleeding.”

He looked down. There was, indeed, a rosy bloom spreading over his side. Not a lot, but with nothing else to look at, of course Rogers would notice it immediately.

“It’s not serious. I’m fine.”

Rogers didn’t mention it again, but he was wearing that contemplative look that the Soldier was learning meant more trouble. He waited for the question to bubble up to the surface.

“When do they let you out of the jacket? What for?”

The position of his arms still tugged at the wound, but as long as he stayed still and let the wall take his weight, the slicing, radiating pain was settling down. He counted to ten before he tried to answer, but Rogers plowed ahead.

“You’re bathed, you have enough freedom to steal sometimes, you disappear. They don’t keep you in that thing twenty-four seven. What do they take it off for? And why do they put it on?”

He was tired of fielding Rogers’ questions. He was the one who was supposed to be asking questions, and Rogers always seemed to take the lead. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. This was why he was failing.

He kept his mouth shut.

Rogers huffed and turned away, careful not to put his back to Call Me Jimmy, but leaving the message clear.

* * *

 

If he thought he was distracted in the field, it was nothing to what he allowed that night.

He was frustrated by his last encounter with Rogers, frustrated with himself, and deeply unhappy at seeing Rogers trussed up yet again after the tense day they’d shared. It was stupid, but true.

And he’d felt … He couldn’t say at first what he’d felt. Every time he saw Rogers like this, it meant that yet more people had had their indifferent hands on him. And it was all beginning to feel pointless. Every time he got close to truly punishing him, he backed off and tried to help him; every time he got close to truly earning Rogers’ unhesitating trust, he fucked it up or else something happened that set them back. There was no end in sight.

And he realized, as he watched himself disappear into Rogers, what that feeling was. What that urge was that filled him like water seeping into every nook and cranny in pavement.

It was protective. It was a fucking protective urge to shield him with his body, take him somewhere else and hide him from the goals beyond that door. He wrapped an arm around Rogers’ waist, the other smoothed over his hip, and he plastered himself across Rogers’ back in a way he never had before. He couldn’t possibly get closer. He pressed them together, held on tight, tucked his nose into the back of Rogers’ neck.

And finally gave Rogers an opening he’d probably been waiting for all this time. His skull slammed backward into the Soldier’s nose with shocking force.

Blood poured freely down his face and dripped onto Rogers’ back. He pulled away, but not out.

He laughed viciously. In a way, this was bad; but in another way, his dilemma had just been figured out for him. The choice was out of his hands now.

He almost swore at him, but even though Rogers couldn’t hear him, it felt wrong, which made him laugh even harder because of everything wrong in this situation, that was a very silly, inconsequential thing to quibble over.

He couldn’t ignore this act of defiance. This was it. He had to finally do what he’d been telling himself was necessary.

He wrapped his metal hand around Rogers’ throat and squeezed once, twice, before he started over properly.

* * *

 

And finally, that was the straw that earned him a beating of his own. He’d been careless and stupid, he’d let himself be damaged, he’d given the prisoner the upper hand. But he deserved it and took it in silence, let them throw him to the floor before the chair that terrified him and made him scream, let them drag him up by the hair and tell him that he was lucky it would be too much of an inconvenience at the moment to start over, that that could change. He’d done that to himself. Now he knew where he stood.

Call Me Jimmy was absent for the next week. He couldn’t go in to see Rogers with his nose broken. Rogers would surely put two and two together and understand exactly whose face he’d cracked his head into, and that would be it. Even if he somehow, miraculously, managed to overlook Call Me Jimmy walking in with a conspicuously identical injury to the one he’d landed on his attacker just the night before, how could he explain walking in with a broken nose one day and having it healed by the end of the week? Rogers’ grasp of time was slipping badly, but if he was at least counting the meals, he’d notice that much. He had to continue to appear weaker than he was.

In the meantime, without Rogers’ voice in his head, without having to see the damage every morning, it was easier to do what he had to. After the first time, that was, when he’d had to steel himself to do it.

And he was brutal. They supplied him with props, which he didn’t need but they obviously expected him to use. So he did. Every night he doled out punishment and proved his commitment to the cause, and every day he sat in the lab and went where they pointed and waited to do it again. Whenever he wasn’t in the room, he was on standby, barely present. Maybe if they kept up like this, he could slip back under the waves and things would go back to normal.

He inflicted pain, he degraded, he used, until Rogers was a mess the likes of which he hadn’t achieved since the beginning. He even used what they gave him -- until they handed him an implement so grotesquely huge that it could only be a weapon. He flexed the absurd rubber monstrosity in his hands, feeling the heft and the lack of real give. There was no way he could put this in Rogers. It would kill him. What the hell were they expecting?

He paced for a while as he considered his options, raking his nails over Rogers’ back with every pass.

Finally, he grabbed a knife and opened a few marks on Rogers’ back until enough blood seeped through to spread thinly over the evil thing. He rubbed his other hand, still lightly slick with lube, over the head of it, positioned it at Rogers’ entrance, and shoved. It wouldn’t go in unless he was prepared to seriously injure him and work at it for some time, and he could admit to himself by now that he wasn’t -- if anything proved it beyond a doubt, this certainly did the trick -- but when he kept that up like a battering ram, never quite breaching, the effect was intense, the experience no doubt incredibly painful and frightening but not dangerous. Rogers flinched away like he rarely did, and the bruising and swelling it caused was spectacular. He swiped his fingers through the bloody mess on Rogers’ back again to rub more over his ass, until it looked like he had been well and truly savaged.

Rogers’ legs were shaking by the time he stopped.

He had the feeling he’d made his point.


	5. Chapter 5

The swelling in his face had gone down and the bruising absorbed by the end of the week. He kept his gaze trained low and his hands loose when the officer addressed him. He stayed blank as he was sized up. He couldn’t discern what orders he feared more, but as he held still under the scrutiny, a calm fell over him that felt a lot like waking up from his frozen sleep, the one that left him confused and fuzzy about whether it had even happened.

There was smugness in the twist of his lips as he cupped the Soldier’s cheek, heedless of the lab techs’ startled and nervous glances. The gentle touch rippled unpleasantly through him.

But he passed. He tipped the Soldier’s chin up with two crooked fingers and tapped it, already turning away to address an agent. It was unclear whether he considered the Soldier defanged enough to be no threat to his vulnerable hand or whether this was another test.

The itch of his fingertips lingered for several minutes after he’d pulled away and left.

Rogers was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, when he Soldier tumbled into the room. He gave no reaction as the Soldier hit the floor, or when he scooted back to the wall, or when he called his name. He didn’t even seem aware of his presence. He studied Rogers’ body while he waited, tallying the marks he recognized and several that he definitely hadn’t put there.

Finally, he whistled, loud and piercing. Rogers’ head turned slowly toward him. His face was blank, not in that careful, measured way he had of hiding his thoughts and reactions, but genuinely devoid of anything resembling life. The Soldier’s stomach lurched, an uncomfortable vertigo like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror. (Had he been in a funhouse? He must have to know it so acutely. What kind of mission had brought him to a carnival?)

“There are one hundred and eighty-two links of chain in this room,” Rogers finally said, voice dreamy and hoarse at the same time. He stared through the Soldier like he could see the wall behind him. “I know because I’ve counted them all nine times. And at the moment, I’m thinking about beating Brock Rumlow bloody with all of them.”

He sounded terrible, and the Soldier had no idea what he was talking about, but the relief that filled him at finally hearing Rogers’ voice again was powerful and dangerous. It expanded through his chest, rolled down to his fingers, settled in the base of his spine.

Rumlow. That was an agent here, right? Not powerful enough to matter, but the Soldier had passed by him a few times.

Before the Soldier could formulate a response, Rogers wrapped his right hand around his forearm, just below the width of the ever-present cuff, and squeezed. It looked absent-minded, without purpose, and the Soldier almost took it for a self-soothing gesture before he realized that Rogers’ arm was beginning to bleed.

“Rogers! Hey!”

He startled badly, slamming his head back into the floor and coughing. He struggled to sit up, mouth parting on what looked like an attempt at speech before his lips shaped into a completely different-looking sound and he said, simply, “Jimmy. Glad you’re not dead.”

He wondered what Rogers had first intended to say.

There were a few more bloody marks and scabs, none very big or dramatic but in places that could easily be self-inflicted. With Rogers’ attention occupied on him, he’d dropped his hand, let his arms hang loose by his sides, and made no moves to try again.

“I haven’t learned how yet,” he answered.

Rogers slumped. The sigh that escaped him was relief and exhaustion all at once, and so was the chuckle that followed.

The truth twisted in his gut. All that time, while the Soldier had been … doing what he’d been doing, Rogers had been worried about him. He might even have had Call Me Jimmy in his restless thoughts while he’d been under the Soldier’s hard and unrelenting hands. He imagined it like a toxin, spreading all throughout him, up and out all the way to his capillaries, all the way to his pores, to leak bruises into his skin, to coat him in the greasy fact of it. To paint him with guilt until even Rogers could see it written across him. Rogers had missed him and worried and thought about him and ... The ache of it sent bile burning up his throat.

He had to stop that train of thought before the room started spinning. “Why Rumlow?”

Rogers started. “Rumlow? What about him? Have you seen him?”

“You said…” The Soldier realized, with vicious clarity, that Rogers had truly been alone in this room for seven days. He hadn’t heard a human voice, or had a conversation, or had anything to fill the time except the occasional interruption of his nightly, silent torture, and he could never hope to know when that was coming. Despite the especially brutal nature of what he’d done to Rogers lately, he strongly suspected that it was only incidental in the scheme of what had been Rogers’ most recent nightmare.

Then, more than ever before, he understood what he had become to Rogers. He was his lifeline. The only human contact Rogers had had for seven days had been a disorienting whirlwind of soundless attacks. And it was completely intentional. They had isolated Rogers so thoroughly that the Soldier was the only shred of hope he had to retain his sanity. Rogers was growing more and more reliant on him. He had no choice.

And having it yanked away …

“Nevermind,” he said. “What about that movie with the dog? You never said how that ends.”

Rogers shrugged. “Don’t remember.” His fingers trailed back up his arm. “How long … How long have you been gone?”

He bit back a sigh. “A week, maybe?” At least Rogers being direct was a good sign.

“When you said they kept you around for your body,” Rogers started suddenly, voice flat, “you didn’t mean for sex, did you? Not totally. They’ve used you for experiments, too, haven’t they? That’s why they keep you wrapped up in that atrocity.” He paused, sitting up straighter. His eyes were clear when he made contact. “You said ‘one of’ your duties. What are the others?”

The Soldier’s mouth opened and closed helplessly for a few seconds. The room seemed to tilt, taking him sideways with it, except how was he still sitting up? He folded in on himself.

“It’s okay,” Rogers rushed to say. “I know you can’t talk about some things. I can tell. Could you just nod or shake your head?”

When the lights blinked out, it was like being transported to another place, like leaving Rogers behind. He sucked in air, shocked at the burning in his lungs. Had he been holding his breath? For how long?

“I don’t…” He coughed. The truth in his veins needed letting, and in the cool darkness, he imagined he was anywhere but this tiny, oppressive room. Just a drop, just enough to lessen the pressure that one bit, and he could breathe again, and fall back into the thorny arms of his lies. “I have gaps.”

“Gaps?”

“I don’t … There’s stuff I don’t remember. Time isn’t the same for me. I can’t help you. I can’t answer your questions.” He blinked against the blackness, training his eyes on the space he knew Rogers occupied. “I’ve done bad things. I know I don’t remember them all. I’ll do more. That’s how it is here.”

He knew it wouldn’t take. But Rogers didn’t push the issue, leaving him both queasy with relief and strangely frustrated that Rogers was ignoring his warning. He didn’t understand. How could he?

Rogers' voice snapped through the blanket of darkness like a chemical flare. “You know, when the lights are out and I listen to you … it’s like going back in time.”

“The hell does that mean?”

He shifted heavily. “You just remind me of someone I used to know. Your voice.”

Maybe Rogers was farther gone than he’d realized.

* * *

 

Rogers came around slowly, but surely. It was hard to say that he improved, under the circumstances, but anything was better than that thousand yard stare. It was undeniable that he’d been deeply affected by the solitary confinement, but as long as Call Me Jimmy continued to show up every day, his tether to the world seemed strengthened and more resolute. He still had lapses, still trailed off and forgot what he was saying sometimes or lost track of the conversation, but he was engaged, he was aware, and he was _angry_. It simmered under his skin and made him restless, vibrated the exhaustion out of his posture.

Aside from those things, the days passed much as they had before. It was almost surreal, actually.

The Soldier kept up his work, more secure in his footing than he’d been since this farce had begun. He’d proven his subservience. He’d proven his command of the situation. He’d done as they’d ordered.

Or so he’d thought.

For a guy barely significant enough to be remembered in passing, Rumlow found his way into the Soldier’s space very quickly. The Soldier had seen him laughing at a video on his phone with a few other people earlier that day, but he hadn’t expected to talk to him. Yet he was waiting in the corner of the lab where the Soldier slept, arms crossed and boots squeaking against the floor as he rocked forward and back on the balls of his feet. The Soldier didn’t recognize him at first until a lab tech greeted him.

His shoulders tightened with apprehension as he approached, but Rumlow didn’t seem much happier to see him. The man kept track of his every movement, turning his body to face him fully at all times.

“Saw your boyfriend,” he said. “You must be getting soft in your old age ‘cause Rogers can still walk.” His lip curled. “Still got a mouth on him, too.”

He waited expectantly.

The Soldier wasn’t attempting to intimidate him, but he had a bad feeling about whatever might have gone on between Rumlow and Rogers, and he couldn’t quite feign servility knowing that. His shoulders went back, his chin tipped up, and he locked eyes. The longer the Soldier stared back at him in silence, the tenser he got, until he started fidgeting.

Finally, he produced a bag he’d had tucked under his arms, shoved it into the Soldier’s chest, and backed up a step. “Call it a gift.”

He spun on his heel to leave, but he turned back at the door. An ugly smirk tugged at his lips. “Oh, and, uh, leave this on. Ol’ Cap needs some discipline.”

The stolen phone was hot in his hand beneath the bag. For a skill he’d let rust, he was getting a lot of practice now. He carefully slipped the phone into the bag, pulling open the case and detaching the battery as unobtrusively as possible before setting the bag on the floor and sitting beside it to wait for his orders.

* * *

 

He trained rigorously all day, closely observed every moment. He could tell what they were gearing up for. Next would come the tests. He was cold and efficient on his rounds, but the damage was done. They would evaluate him soon.

He waited until the door locked behind him to turn to Rogers on the platform, circling around him, studying. The urge to touch his face even over the mask was powerful, but easily ignored. He sat cross-legged beside him and opened the bag.

First, he stuck the battery back in the phone, turned off the location and data, and went straight to the videos. Between a blurry shot of highway and a poorly-lit cock, he found a thumb clip of blond hair and clicked that one.

His heart leapt into his throat as the shaky image onscreen steadied to reveal a figure on the floor of the round room. Even as the camera tried to focus, it was so clearly Rogers, probably from the past week judging by the injuries visible. He looked more alert than the Soldier had seen him the other day.

“Been a while,” said a tinny voice from offscreen. “You look like shit, Cap.”

“You look like traitorous scum,” Rogers said. Cap. Rumlow had called him Cap. He was Captain Rogers?

A laugh crackled through the speakers, setting him on edge. “One of us is on his knees right now, and it ain’t me. I’d say I’m doing fine.” He paused, walking behind Rogers.

The phone was passed to someone offscreen, tilting the room nauseatingly on edge for a few seconds, and Rumlow moved into view. “If you’d’ve just kept your nose where it belonged and kept on being Fury’s errand boy, you wouldn’t be in this mess. You had to go looking through files that weren’t yours and messing with carefully laid plans beyond your comprehension. I’d say you’re getting exactly what’s coming to you, but I don’t think you’re getting the full experience.” He paused, reaching out to push a few loose strands of hair off of Rogers’ forehead. His fascination was palpable, like he’d waited ages to touch this man and wanted to drink in every second of it now that he had all the power.

The Soldier wondered if he’d volunteered for this, wondered what his relationship with Rogers had been like before he’d been captured, their history obvious.

Rogers jerked back, his blank mask cracking into anger.

Rumlow backhanded him and grabbed the hair at his nape instead. “I think you missed me. I think even the great Captain America is just a lonely, pitiful bitch underneath it all. I bet you’re so starved for attention here, you’d beg for the privilege of my cock.” He palmed his crotch with his other hand. His face wasn’t visible, but the tilt of his head looked like he was considering something. “How ‘bout it, Cap?”

Rogers smiled serenely. “Anything you put near my mouth gets the full force of my jaws. How ‘bout that?”

Rumlow tugged his head back farther. “I could just break it. Do whatever I want.”

Rogers shrugged. “But then how will I tell you what you want to hear? Go ask whoever’s holding your leash how they feel about that.”

“What about if I got your little friend, huh? Bet you’d do as you’re told then. Bet if it was you or him, you’d swallow my cock and be grateful. Goddamn righteous prick.”

A bolt of fear seized him, wondering if that was within Rumlow’s power to actually do. The Soldier had done horrific things, but setting Rogers up to be complicit in his own violation in order to spare the dignity of the man responsible for so much of his suffering … that was just too fucking much even for him to process. He knew that Rogers would have done it in an instant. It seemed like an empty threat at the moment, but he filed it away as something to mentally prepare himself for, just in case. He was a good actor, but he wasn’t sure he could be that good.

He watched the rest of the video thinking about wrapping his flesh fingers around Rumlow’s throat and squeezing until he could feel the pops. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, just the average beating a non-enhanced mercenary could dole out to a sick, injured man, and the spiteful bit at the end when he’d forced a stun baton down Rogers’ throat in lieu of a blowjob all the while keeping up the mocking, degrading commentary. Before the video cut out suddenly, he jabbed a quick, cryptic, “You know, your redheaded cunt is looking for you,” leaving the Soldier with yet more questions. But ugly as it was, it was clear that he’d lost the battle of wills, and that was a problem.

The Soldier could admit by now that he was jealous and angry, but that wasn’t his main trouble. Rumlow hadn’t been looking for information. He’d been checking on the Soldier’s progress. He’d been gauging Rogers’ will.

As satisfying as it was to see Rumlow not get what he wanted, the Soldier’s heart sunk. If Rumlow’s visit hadn’t broken Steve’s will and convinced him to stop fighting, then once again, that would fall to the Soldier, or they’d be back where they started, with him in the chair and Rogers …

What the hell would they do with Rogers when they got what they wanted, anyway? He assumed that the same technology that had created the pinnacle of weaponry in the form of the Winter Soldier could also be used on an unwilling participant.

He shuddered thinking about it.

He had to do whatever it took to maintain control over the situation. He couldn’t leave Rogers alone like that again.

His finger hovered over the icon to delete the video, but he stopped himself, taking the battery out again and shoving them aside to wait until he could slip them back onto Rumlow’s person later.

He dumped out the bag to examine the items he’d been told to use.

They weren’t horrific, all things considered. A large plug and a chain with clamps dangling from either end. He did what he’d come to do and applied them both before he left.

* * *

 

Call Me Jimmy was in over his head the next morning when he landed in the round room to find Rogers secured exactly where he’d left him the night before. The hood was off and they’d repositioned him slightly, bent forward with his arms stretched out and wrists secured to the edge of the platform so his tailbone pushed skyward, exposing the plug, but otherwise nothing had changed. Rogers jerked in the limited give of the chains when the door slammed.

It was surreal to see him in that tableau with his face exposed. Surreal and appalling. As he got his feet under him and walked around Rogers, his stomach plummeted.

“Don’t look,” Rogers said as soon as he darted his eyes up at the Soldier and away to the far wall. “Just. Somewhere else, please.”

He sat against the wall in front of Rogers, angled away slightly to keep Rogers in his peripheral only. For a while, the only sound was Rogers’ heavy, focused breathing.

Rogers was tense, of course, but he also frequently tried to look over his shoulder toward the door, and eventually the Soldier realized why. It wasn’t just the compromising position. This changed the stakes. Before there’d been a pattern, been a rhythm, and this said that things were changing and anything could happen anytime. Call Me Jimmy time was safe time for Rogers, and now it wasn’t, and … Shit, he was probably humiliated, of course, but his primary concern must be that they weren’t finished. That whoever was assaulting him would come in and finish the job with Call Me Jimmy still present. Rumlow’s taunt was probably still fresh in his mind.

Something wound very tight deep in the Soldier’s chest at the bitter reassurance he couldn’t give that Rogers was, ironically, safer with him in the room. Rogers was waiting for a specter that wasn’t coming, had already arrived, but the Soldier had no way of telling him that.

There was an untouched tray by the door. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but he knew that he’d had time enough to shower, eat, be examined, and train between his last visit and this one.

“I know you want space,” he said with all the weight of a speculative weather observation, “but you have to drink something.”

Rogers laughed, and it was impressive how much he almost sounded like himself. Well, himself as the Soldier had known him, at any rate; he had no way of knowing who Rogers had been before this whole thing had begun -- a captain who opposed Hydra and watched a shocking variety of movies, more or less -- but even the Soldier knew that these were far from normal circumstances. Someone whose mind hadn’t been birthed into this life had to be changed by it.

“How do you suppose I do that?”

He didn’t answer right away, considering his options. “I’ll help you,” he finally said.

Rogers looked straight at him. His face scrunched in confusion. “What?”

“You’ve been feeding me this whole time. I could return the favor.”

“Setting aside the question of logistics for a moment…” Rogers squirmed, wincing. His fists were clenched in front of him, nails biting into his palms.

The Soldier thought about all the times he’d seen Rogers carefully avoid being on his knees for more than a moment, how much he obviously hated it. The Soldier hadn’t put him there, but it was hard not to feel responsible with Rogers writhing around the blunt weight in his ass that he had put there, the heavy chain between his clamped nipples swinging freely with every wriggle.

“Look,” he continued, voice surprisingly level, “this isn’t like that.”

“No, it’s worse. And I know this is different, but I didn’t exactly enjoy being hand-fed like a baby either”-- and that was a lie because of course he hadn’t appreciated it for the most part, but there were times when he hadn’t minded -- “and I’m telling you, you’ve gotta drink something.”

“So I can piss all over myself later, then.”

The Soldier winced at the possibility. He wasn’t wrong. They had no way of knowing how long they’d be there. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” he said, already moving toward the tray. He squinted in thought for a moment before kneeling down to grab the rim of the cup in his teeth and carry it back. He set it on the floor by his feet and sat beside Rogers.

“No.” Rogers was firm, uncannily so for a man in his position. “Whatever you have in mind, no.”

“Okay.” He breathed deeply for a few heartbeats. “I can respect that. Now, here’s the thing, though. It’s your business what you want to do, but me, see, I’m only touching half of this. So what happens to the rest is up to you.”

Rogers waited a moment, then another, staring at him with his face totally unreadable, and then he suddenly dropped his head and sobbed a laugh that rocked his entire body. “That was good,” he said as he finally settled back down, a slight wheeze in his voice. “Son of a bitch, that was good.”

He waited. “Fine. Fair enough. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, first, I was thinking I could take care of those.” He nodded toward the chain glinting beneath Rogers.

Color flushed high on his cheeks, but he didn’t say anything as the Soldier slid his foot under his chest to hook it on the chain and pause. When Rogers nodded, he jerked. The clamps came away cleanly, with barely a twitch on Rogers’ part despite how much it must have hurt. Perspective, he supposed. He tossed them away to the side.

It was awkward, and it took a bit of maneuvering and a very awkward explanation to a deeply skeptical Rogers, but he once again clenched the rim of the cup in his teeth to lift it, and then he carefully opened his lips and tipped his head back to slurp some water into his mouth and hold it there. He shuffled closer to Rogers and leaned down.

He’d never been so close to his face before. It was all he could do not to stare, but Rogers was uncomfortable enough without drawing this out. Rogers tilted his head back as far as he could in that position, straining his neck, and the Soldier quickly slotted his lips over Rogers’, waited for them to part, and opened his own to release his mouthful of reciprocity. It was a bizarre feeling, and a not inconsiderable amount trickled past the weak seal of their lips to run down Rogers’ chin.

They kept up like that until the cup was empty, with the Soldier dutifully taking a sip for Rogers and then a sip for himself, the process slow but engrossing. Under other circumstances, Rogers probably would have noticed that the Soldier was only pretending to swallow each mouthful he took for himself, in actuality leaving the entire cup for Rogers.

When they were finished, he glanced back at the tray and asked if Rogers could eat, but when he shuddered and turned him down flat, he didn’t push the issue.

The Soldier started up a conversation, mostly about how he’d fix the plot holes in some of the movies that Rogers had described. Rogers didn’t respond much, but he relaxed slightly, at least as much as he could.


	6. Chapter 6

It became clear that Rumlow was still visiting Rogers. Probably not every day, but with the marks adding up across his body, definitely more than once. He didn’t pull another stunt like that day on the platform (and it scared the Soldier how he must have underestimated Rumlow’s standing, if he’d been able to orchestrate that), but the Soldier had no idea what was happening.

Once, black and blue from the waist up, Rogers had gone to piss and suddenly laughed, saying, “I thought that felt like a kidney shot.” He started to ask the Soldier questions about Rumlow, but he didn’t have answers, only questions of his own. That night, he’d stolen a tube of analgesic cream left unattended in the lab and applied it to the worst of the bruising. He didn’t know if it would do much considering Rogers’ enhanced physiology, but it was worth a shot. The more chances he took, the more he stole, the more he realized the techs had become so accustomed to his presence that they were getting sloppy.

“He can’t kill me,” Rogers finally said. His certainty was chilling. “They need me for something. If they could kill me, they’d have done it already.”

* * *

 

Rumlow pressed an envelope into his hand, yanking his arm back like he’d tried to pet a snake and suddenly come to his senses. “This is from the research lab. You put one on the back of his neck, make sure it’s flush, and the other between his shoulders. The lab guys say it’s more potent on the neck, but the other one’s for backup in case he gets the first one off. This’ll keep him in his place. He’ll stay down.”

His usual handler looked on carefully, eyes narrowed as though he wasn’t sure how the Soldier would respond.

He nodded and turned toward the door, waiting to be led back to the round room to complete this new task. The unease that slithered through his guts was nothing new, but he wondered whether they were leaving this to him for their own safety or as another test of his compliance.

He waited to open the envelope until he was before Rogers, strung up back in the usual position. There were two patches inside, each giving off an acrid, chemical smell that burned his sinuses. He peeled off the backing and applied them as instructed, then worked steadily as usual when nothing happened.

The next morning, Rogers was pale and sluggish, but he kept up his end of the conversation. There was a palpable anxiety under his skin, though, that the Soldier hadn’t seen before, a helpless urgency with no way to fix it.

The next night, his posture loosened in his chains.

By day four, Rogers could barely sit up. From the moment the Soldier was tossed into the room, Rogers had already been hunched over the drain vomiting stomach acid.

If their goal was to extract information, they’d failed. Nothing useful could come from this. If their goal was to weaken him and make him suffer, they were succeeding in spades.

He observed Rogers through his bangs as he gathered himself, rolling to his knees and then up onto his feet. It was unclear if Rogers was even aware that he was there until he leaned into the wall beside him and slid down to the floor, close enough to feel the fever rising from his clammy skin; from which sweat poured so freely that it had actually managed to partially dissolve the crust of filth that perpetually covered him, revealing in its wake wide swaths of sickly paleness and patches of mottled rash. The urge to lay a hand across the back of Rogers’ neck swelled and burst -- it would be stupid and not possible even if he had the use of his hands. He nudged Rogers’ foot with his own instead.

Rogers startled badly, falling onto his shoulder with a grunt and a grimace as he tried to whip around.

Completely unnecessarily, the Soldier could only say, “It’s me.”

“Course it’s you.” His laugh was discordant and scratchy. It made the back of the Soldier’s neck buzz and prickle.

Rogers started to sit up, but his arms shook so badly that he gave up and dropped heavily back onto the floor. His eyes were squeezed shut, hard breaths moving his chest irregularly. It was pitiful to watch.

The Soldier wasn’t sure how to proceed. _Nothing_ useful could come from this meeting, and yet he couldn’t leave. But he didn’t really want to leave, when it came down to it. He could admit that to himself. The idea of leaving Rogers alone like this shot a powerful wave of unease through him, powerful enough to cut through the denial he’d been cloaking his Rogers-related desires in. He shouldn’t have to suffer alone. Dwelling on that ache couldn’t distract him from the knowledge of what he would be forced to do to Rogers the next time he saw him. As soon as he left this room, it was only a matter of time before they ordered him to return and fulfill his other obligation.

He’d do it. He’d follow his orders and continue his mission. For the first time, though, the feelings that simmered in his gut when he thought about this organization were coalescing into a glowing coal of hatred. The anger was good, though. It kept his hands steady while he worked. But here it did nothing, served only to make him restless.

He slid closer to Rogers as quietly as he could, but he doubted it mattered. Rogers was in his own little world of misery, and the longer he watched, the more tenuous Rogers’ grasp on reality seemed. His shivering had become violent spasms, the chains rattling constantly and leaving new bruises where they fell across him. His chest moved rapidly, dragging in desperate, shallow breaths and wheezing out harsh puffs.

He knew intimately the kind of damage Rogers had endured in this place. In all this time, he hadn’t really acknowledged his discomfort, laughing it off the few times he’d come close, even when the Soldier knew it had to be severe. Some of the things he’d done would be debilitating to a normal person. Some had proven temporarily debilitating to Rogers. Seeing him like this was alarming.

When Rogers started to choke, body bowstring tight and face ashen, the Soldier couldn’t take it anymore. He nudged Rogers onto his front with his foot, rolled to his knees beside him, and leaned over his back. With his arms bound, he supported himself with his chest on Rogers’ shoulders, trying to do so as lightly as possible.

Rogers protested, unwillingness in every angle of his body, every weak shift of his limbs as he moaned his resistance. He was right to protest, of course. A strange calmness wrapped its way around the Soldier at the thought that this was the first time he’d even been able to. Every time the Soldier had tormented him, he’d already been bound and waiting. He couldn’t beg, or bargain, or scream. He couldn’t even glare his hatred through the mask. He was effectively an object for violence without even the option to attempt defiance, a fighter denied the dignity of a fight. Even breaking the Soldier’s nose didn’t count for much, all things considered. But now, with the Soldier’s weight on him from behind and finally the ability to put up a struggle, to choose and have a voice, he did.

And failed, too weak to push away the nightmare now that he had his chance.

He didn’t try to soothe Rogers. Whether he felt betrayed at Call Me Jimmy’s apparent actions -- or wasn’t cognizant enough to understand more than how badly he didn’t want what usually followed someone pressing against his back, or maybe was just reacting purely on instinct -- was unclear, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that this would be unpleasant and invasive for Rogers no matter what and Rogers was too far gone to agree to it, so he tried to work quickly.

When the Soldier’s lips touched his neck, Rogers shuddered and cringed. The Soldier scraped his teeth against a corner of the patch, tasting salt from Rogers’ skin and the pungent bitterness of the poison. When it finally pulled slightly away, he clenched it in his teeth and carefully peeled it off, trying not to take too much skin with it. By the time he’d removed it completely and spat it onto the floor, his lips were tingling and he was lightheaded, a headache pulsing behind his eyes and nausea stirring his stomach. All from being in contact with the active side of the patch for just a few minutes.

Rogers had been wearing it for days.

He took a few minutes to collect himself, shuffling away to give Rogers space in the wake of that necessary violation before he had to do it again. The one between his shoulder blades was trickier, the angle worse, but Rogers seemed to realize by now that he wasn’t being taken advantage of in this vulnerable state. He continued to squirm and pant, deeply uncomfortable with the Soldier straddling him from behind to reach the awkward spot, but he didn’t try to pull away. The skin exposed to the patches looked raw, like a chemical burn.

If he pushed the patches into the drain, they would likely be found. One patch they might assume was Rogers’ doing, but the one between his shoulders was intentionally positioned in such an awkward place, with the patch extremely thin and difficult to grab and the adhesive exceptionally strong. In this state, in these chains, they would be suspicious at the idea of Rogers removing it himself. But if they just disappeared, that would be suspicious as well. In the end, he used his feet to maneuver them into the inside cuff of his pant leg, hoping that he wouldn’t be searched when the gas rushed in and he was extracted. If it wasn’t found, he’d dispose of it then and hope they didn’t realize, and if asked, he’d be forced to explain that he could extract nothing useful from Rogers in this state and had taken the matter into his own hands.

It took some time for Rogers’ chest to finally slow, still gulping air but not as desperately. His muscles twitched but no longer jerked. He was almost still.

The Soldier sighed.

“C’mere,” he murmured. When Rogers didn’t react, he shifted closer until he could slip a knee under Rogers’ shoulder. “Scoot up. I can’t pull you.”

Rogers wrapped an arm over the Soldier’s leg to haul himself across his lap from the shoulders up. It looked tiresome and arduous just maneuvering himself, let alone dragging the chain up, but it struck the Soldier, as Rogers shifted to get comfortable and rest his head, that it happened very quickly. Without protesting or even considering, Rogers had listened. He’d allowed the Soldier to touch him and even brought himself closer. He wasn’t exactly standoffish the rest of the time, but with the context that the Soldier had, and what he’d just had to do, it really showed the compromised state he was in.

For a while, they rested like that, motionless and silent. Rogers was boneless with fatigue and bleeding heat through the Soldier’s pants, sweat and filth soaking into the dense fabric. They’d been close before, shared strangely, intensely intimate moments, but it was a careful intimacy, not a comfortable one. Rogers’ mind never slowed, and there was a deliberateness to his every action, his every move. They were at arms’ length and always slightly wary and unsure, forced together only by necessity but otherwise in their own space. The only other times the Soldier had been this close to Rogers … well, they’d been as close as possible, but with a rigid and unwilling victim, the line was clear.

Rogers collapsed across him, head pillowed on his thigh so close to his dick that the friction of his pants made him twitch, was utterly unlike those times. He didn’t deserve this, this trust, and Rogers deserved this betrayal even less. His stomach roiled with something he thought might be shame, considering only briefly pushing Rogers away, but in the end, the decision was easy.

It was tricky to bend his leg and get his foot up high enough to rub whatever part of Rogers he could reach, but when he shuddered with relief and sighed, the Soldier knew it was worth it. He dragged his toes over Rogers’ knee where it was bent forward, down his leg, over the top of his foot, down and up and down and up, just to give the man some skin-on-skin contact that wasn’t trying to destroy him for a change. He kept it up after his leg started cramping, until Rogers’ breathing finally evened out enough that he might have been asleep.

The Soldier stretched his leg back out carefully, trying not to jostle him, and tipped his head back into the wall. He closed his eyes, but when Rogers started mumbling and shifting, they flew open.

“Buck,” he was saying, slurred and slow, breaths pushed tightly past his dry lips. “Buck … hurts.”

A dull rushing filled the Soldier’s head. His fingers flexed in the sleeves of the jacket. The seams creaked in warning, the sound sending visceral sparks up his spine.

“Hurts how?” he said. His voice drifted out of him like smoke, barely there and nearly as silent. He felt about as solid.

Rogers heard him anyway, so close and so quiet. “Everywhere. Everything. Just hurts.”

He closed his eyes again. The jarring sensation in his skull, crawling up his skin, wasn’t as bad when he didn’t look at him. “It won’t be forever.”

A croaking, crackling sound made him squint one eye open again. Rogers was chuckling.

“Nothing’s forever,” he mumbled. “Never wanted forever…”

He was delirious. The Soldier could ride it out, was pretty sure Rogers would remember nothing of this later regardless of what he did, but he was struck by the urge to do … do the right thing. Whatever that was. One less thing to remember uncomfortably when he looked at Rogers. Whatever he could do that would make this easier, or at least not make it worse.

But Rogers was picking up steam, eyes unnervingly bright and hazy. “Never expected much at all. You know that, Bucky.”

He itched. A low throbbing at the base of his skull was starting. If it kept up, he was supposed to report it to maintenance.

He gritted his teeth.

Rogers shifted, pulling himself further into the Soldier’s lap. “Remember when I had scarlet fever?”

He wanted to look away. He wanted to close his eyes again. He couldn’t. He couldn’t move with the way Rogers was staring at him, staring through him.

Rogers finally broke the contact, blinking and tipping his face down to rest between the Soldier’s legs. “Everyone thought I was gone … Everyone … Not you, though … Not you.”

He wrapped himself around the Soldier in lethargic movements, all awkwardness and none of the grace and sharpness the Soldier had been both cataloging and admiring all this time. While Rogers was busy, the Soldier was lost in thought. Rogers was confused, sure, deeply so, but there was a kernel of awareness there. He could see it in his eyes. Beneath the exhaustion and pain, there was something familiar. He thought he’d seen it before, buried deeply, kept tightly private where Rogers knew he couldn’t reach it. Like a creature on the basin floor of shallow, murky water, he could see it move, but he couldn’t know what it was until it broke the surface.

Rogers was remembering this Buck person. This friend. Maybe the one with the voice. They’d been close. He hadn’t been wrong, then, back at the beginning: they had picked him for a reason.They had counted on his appearance to mean something to Rogers.

“What would Ma say, she were here,” he breathed. “What would she think if she saw me … ‘Get up, Steve. The ground’s for the dead. You’re not due yet.’” He sniffed harshly. “’I won’t allow it.’”

He was quiet for a long time after, shifting in restless, pained movements that brought him into contact with the Soldier’s groin more than once. But that didn’t matter, because he’d learned that Captain Rogers’ name was Steve. It wasn’t really important. He still didn’t recognize it, so it effectively changed nothing.

Still, the man in his lap was Steve Rogers, and he thought, at least for the moment, that the Soldier was his old friend. Maybe it brought him some comfort.

“All the doctors I saw growing up,” he started again. “Always telling me to undress, putting their hands on me without saying why or warning me, always ordering me around. Putting.” He sucked loudly on his tongue like the words made him choke. “Putting things in my mouth or talking about … things I needed put in me, like I wasn’t even there. Treating me like a thing, like a chore. It drove her crazy. Lit her up like a firecracker. She said, ‘You don’t do that to people. You treat them better than that.’ And she told me, always, she said, ‘If something feels wrong, believe yourself.’”

He flopped onto his back, dropping his head heavily into the Soldier’s crotch again with no notice and looking up. He was wholly exposed, the length of him completely vulnerable from his upturned face and bared neck to his naked genitals and all the way down to his feet, and it was jarringly at odds with his story. “Remember O’Leary? That guy lived ‘cross the hall from me and Ma? He was always offering to watch me while she was working. Ma always turned him down. Didn’t trust him.” He swallowed loudly, closing his eyes. “Told me one day, she said she didn’t like how he looked at me. Told me not to go near him. So I didn’t, mostly. Only I came home one day with a bloody nose, getting it everywhere, no way into the apartment, and the landlord hated that, remember? Used to make hell every time. I was afraid of getting us in trouble again. He found me on the stairs, gave me a handkerchief. Said I could wait for the bleeding to stop at his place. Wash my face in his kitchen.”

Having Rogers -- Steve -- squirming in his lap was incredibly inconvenient. That knock from his skull had been a blessing, unpleasant but centering. It was one thing to work himself up to perform for his mission despite the ugliness of his orders. This was different. Steve’s scattered ramblings weren’t arousing in the least, were disturbing and worrying, but after all of the ugliness of the Soldier’s life, he could reliably get it up in pretty awful circumstances. The last thing he wanted was for Steve to feel an erection poking him in the back of the head while he talked about how the Soldier might not have been the first to use him this way.

Every aspect of that thought sent flickers of rage curling and licking throughout the Soldier’s body. He tamped it down. Whatever Steve said next, it wouldn’t really change anything. He’d almost certainly done much worse to him than this neighbor ever could have, despite his creeping apprehension. But once again, the idea of anyone else hurting Steve, especially this way … the Soldier couldn’t even begin to parse his feelings on that one. He didn’t deserve the protective outrage that filled him. It was sick to think he had the right after what he’d done, what he’d continue to do in just a matter of hours and for who knew how long.

“It was okay at first. Then he started rubbing my back, which was fine, I guess. Barely noticed when he slipped under my shirt. I was just a kid, didn’t really think about it. And my face hurt.” He laughed again. “Remember that, when a broken nose felt like a big hurt? Like real pain? By the time Ma got home and went looking for me, his other hand was dipping into my pants. Didn’t make it very far.” He paused again, a strange smile pulling at his mouth, serene and just a little smug, just a little proud. “She about tore him to shreds. Scared him so bad, that’s why he moved.”

The Soldier smiled in return, not without a slightly ugly edge to it. Steve was smiling at the thought of his mother frightening the man who’d tried to hurt him while draped over the lap of the man hurting him now, systematically and successfully. But it was all the comfort he had in this place. After everything he’d been through, finally, privately, he just wanted his mother.

He was hoarse when he continued, all the strange lightness from before gone. “She said … said if someone, anyone, laid hands on me how I didn’t want, no matter what, even if I’d trusted them … said it wasn’t my fault. But I didn’t have to accept it. I could fight. I could say no. Even if I thought I knew them. And that if I saw it happening to someone else, I should stop it. Had to stop it. Always. ‘Gotta look after each other, baby, as if they’re one of yours. It’s what we do to be human.’”

He shifted again, and the Soldier took the opportunity to cross his legs and jostle Steve’s shoulder a little to encourage him back. It was slow-going, but he pulled himself back into the Soldier’s lap and, this time, wrapped his arms around his waist. They pressed together like that wisdom could be osmotically imparted, equalized between the two of them until they saw eye to eye and Steve could get him on the same page. Like he could make him understand if he just clung hard enough.

“That, uh, that Ellie girl you were sweet on, remember her? She all of a sudden disappeared, and I couldn’t tell you why? It was her old man, Buck. He was putting his hands on her. Everyone knew; no one did anything. No one ever says anything, that happens. People don’t talk. But Ma. Oh, Buck. She was the only thing standing between Ellie and her old man, and she didn’t back down. Let her stay with us until her cousin could scrounge up the money to get her out to the country and live with her. I was so proud.”

His arms tightened. “Ma didn’t ever want people to feel that pain. Didn’t want me to feel like this. God, I hope she never felt like this.” His shoulders jumped once, and then he relaxed again, but he wasn’t boneless anymore. There was tension running through him like current through a live wire. “’Don’t ever let them treat you like less than you are.’ S’what she said. ‘You are a person. Make them acknowledge you as one. And if they still want to do you evil, make them look you in the eye.’ That was her. S’what she made me. She gave me that.”

It was all too much to process. Rogers rested quietly again after his rushed, fever-drunk monologue, but the Soldier couldn’t stop the echoes that bounced around his brain.

Steve nuzzled his face into his thigh, yanking him from his murky thoughts. Eyes still closed, he said, “You smell like sex. Were they hurting you?”

He froze. He’d gone straight from his rounds, which had taken most of the night, to Steve’s cell, without being permitted to shower between. Steve’s filter at the moment was basically down to nothing, but when he recovered, it was hard to say what he’d remember. It was easier to focus on the tactical necessity of his answer than the ache in his chest at how quickly Steve assumed that those scents must mean pain. Of course he did. And he was right to. But it was the Soldier who had done that, had changed him. He had no recollection of sexual encounters outside of his orders, but the understanding was growing, deep in his bones, of how wrong this was. How it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not for people like Steve, at least.

“Not exactly like you’re thinking,” he settled on. It was uncomfortable, after all, now that he was saving all of his lube for Steve, and ideally he wouldn’t have chosen to do it. He didn’t enjoy it on any level, and it was harder every time lately. He knew he didn’t want this, as dangerous as it was to want anything in this place. But Steve’s experience wasn’t one he shared, and he couldn’t bring himself to claim it even for the ruse. “Your friend … the one you talk about … Was his mother like that?”

“No one was like Sarah Rogers,” he said. “But Mrs. Barnes was pretty great.”

A bolt of pain seared through his temples. He held his breath while he waited for it to pass. Why did he even want to know? Just to keep Rogers distracted?

“Ma and I were poor, remember. Mrs. Barnes was always arranging things so I’d somehow be at the house around dinner, and of course I had to eat while I was there. It’d be rude not to.” He chuckled quietly. “She was shrewd. Good woman.”

There was a sound like static filling his head, a deeply weighted feeling of water trying to pull him under and drag him down cloaking his body. “You should … You need to drink.” He looked across the room at the tray that had been on the floor when he’d arrived.

Steve didn’t answer.

“I know you can’t eat now, but you’ve got to get some fluids into you at least.”

Steve covered his face and shook his head.

“C’mon. Steve, please. Drink something.”

The set of his shoulders changed. He wasn’t quite tensing, or even preparing to move, but his weight in the Soldier’s lap was different. He played his hunch.

“Steve.”

He looked up. His eyelashes were damp, but there were no tear tracks on his face. It just made him look wild, almost feral in a way the newly-grown beard didn’t even manage.

“Go get the cup.”

Steve stared at him for a long time, studying his face from below. When he finally moved, he all but crawled to the tray, collapsing into a heap as soon as he reached it. He lay panting for several long minutes before he even attempted to push himself up. For a few seconds, it seemed like he was considering how to pull himself back over to the Soldier while carrying the cup, and then his face fell and he simply propped himself up on the wall and slid the tray closer.

Something warm slid into the Soldier’s chest, brief but bright before it was extinguished by dread. He shouldn’t have allowed Rogers to draw comfort from him; he’d just made the man crave it more. That was good for the mission. It was what the mission was about. But this was so much uglier than a severed carotid. It was so much more insidious and piercing. He was doing everything right. He was closer than ever to reaching Hydra’s goals, and the sooner he brought Rogers all the way down, the sooner he’d be done, and this charade would end, and his superiors could do … whatever they were going to do with him. Probably kill him. But it was impossible to say without context for their initial interest in him.

Coldness seeped in to fill the warmth’s void, clenching his muscles and parching his mouth. He couldn’t deny it anymore: he wanted Steve to survive this. He cared. Some bruised part of him wanted to drag this out to keep him alive, not knowing what was in store for him. This mission would end eventually, one way or another; either he would succeed, and he would either never see Rogers again or possibly be tasked with his termination, or he would fail, and he would be punished and this mission would fall to someone else. There was no version that ended with Steve Rogers breathing freely and unbound outside these walls again.

It would do neither of them any favors to drag this out any more than he already had.

Rogers slumped lower and lower, holding the cup to his lips with both hands and occasionally tipping it to take small sips. When his face wasn’t blank with exhaustion, he was grimacing, and more than once he paused and appeared to be suppressing nausea. But he drank until nothing could be heard sloshing in the cup, and after he set it down, he crawled back.

He curled into the Soldier’s side and went to sleep, unaware as he faced the door that his back was to the enemy.

* * *

 

How would you characterize his decline?

“He cried like a child for his mother.”

Laughter followed. His stomach turned.

“None of the information had value.” He kept his tone flat, dragged back the pleading note threatening to erupt and smothered it. “The drug is too strong.”

We will decide what information has value, Soldier. Not you. You have overstepped again.

He gambled. “I thought it would convince him to trust me and expedite the mission.”

He waited for his punishment to be carried out. The horseshoe mark on the floor had been cleaned. There was nothing distinctive to stare at, just a gleaming expanse of white.

But they seemed to agree. They did not punish him when they found the patches he’d removed unauthorized except to halve his rations and imply heavily that the next time he placed his opinions higher than those of his superiors, he’d need to be evaluated for reconditioning. He knew what that meant.

The next patches they gave him, gazes weighted and stern, were much smaller, with a duller scent. He applied them as instructed, tongue clenched between his teeth, and carefully smoothed his flesh palm across them in what might have been a soothing motion were it not an unwelcome hand activating yet another poison. Whether it began its work so quickly was unclear, but Rogers undeniably understood what this meant, what this would mean, and had no way of knowing that this one might be weaker. He flexed his shoulders as much as he could in that position, trying to roll them and dislodge the patch, but of course it was futile. A fine tremor worked down his body, only perceptible by virtue of their naked proximity.

He grabbed the lubricant. His stomach flipped.


	7. Chapter 7

The new patches seemed to work as intended. Steve was definitely incapacitated, growing weaker every day, but the effect wasn’t as pronounced and the time-release much slower than the rapid spiral of the prototype. He couldn’t fight, but he could keep food down and sit up, and he was aware.

The wait for Steve’s recollections to reveal themselves was interminable. 

When the Soldier had called him Steve the next day, he’d been startled and suspicious, before the Soldier had explained. 

“What do you want me to call you?” he’d asked.

Steve had thought for a long moment before deciding that “Steve” was fine.

It was probable that he remembered nothing of the day he’d spent across the Soldier’s lap, but he couldn’t be sure. The Soldier knew he would lose this the next time they had him in the chair, the weight of him and the clutch of his hands, but he hoped his body remembered. Sometimes it held onto things. 

“You forgot about me.”

The Soldier squinted at Steve in confusion. “Say again?”

“That song you’ve been humming,” Steve said. “I know that one. ‘You Forgot About Me.’ Bob Crosby. Used to be real popular. Friend of mine would hum it night and day like it was going out of style. Course, he was a romantic.”

A friend. He’d bet anything that he meant that Bucky guy.

He set that thought aside for the moment, though. He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been humming that tune, just that it had been long enough for styles to actually go in and out. But the tune had stayed in his head when the rest of his thoughts leaked like a sieve. “You know the words?”

“Yeah, a few bars.” His mouth tightened. A strange expression passed over his face. “I don’t feel much like singing, though. Sorry.”

“No, I understand,” he mumbled. He hesitated before he asked what he really wanted to know. “What year did it come out?”

Steve glanced up at him, raising his eyebrows. “Long time ago.” He paused, then took a deep breath, as though he was preparing for something. “Late Thirties, early Forties, roundabout.”

The Soldier nodded and didn’t comment. He knew that he was old, felt it in his bones and understood it to be the only way to make sense of his jumble of memories, but it seemed like Rogers was implying that he remembered it from its early days, too. That he was also older than he appeared. _Ol’ Cap needs some discipline_ , Rumlow had said.

Another piece of information dropped into place to explain why Hydra wanted him.

A sudden and stupid thought popped into the Soldier’s mind and crossed his lips before he could reel it back. “Can I blow you?” he asked, immediately regretting it.

Rogers’ eyes were like saucers. He didn’t react right away, just kept staring, before he looked the Soldier up and down. He may not have been able to read Steve, but he could usually tell when he was turning something over, and now he was blank. He could be considering, or appalled, or off somewhere else entirely.

“Sorry,” he rushed to say. “Sorry, I don’t know -- I don’t know why I asked that. That’s. Yeah, sorry.”

He thought about Steve’s weight against him while he’d been knocked down by the full force of that drug, all the ugly stories he’d told, the way he’d stretched out beside him, curled into him. He thought it had been good for Steve to touch someone and be touched without being hurt. He’d been different after, different with him. It couldn’t be a good idea, but in the moment, it seemed important to try. And he wanted to. He wanted to touch him without the pain, watch his reactions. Touch _someone_ without being told to, without orders to destroy. He wanted Steve to have the choice for a change. To give him the choice. He just -- he _wanted_.

“Okay.”

The Soldier was still apologizing when his mind caught up with his ears and he froze. “Okay?”

“Sure. Why not?” He adjusted his posture against the wall, sitting up more and pushing his shoulders back but angling his hips out slightly. He hesitated, but he opened his legs a bit, knees bent and feet planted. “I should warn you, though: I haven’t washed up in a while. Still interested?”

He nodded. He had the sense, as Steve watched him inch closer on his knees, that Steve thought this was to help him. That maybe Call Me Jimmy needed to work out his own stuff. It didn’t matter, really. But he could feel the weight of Steve’s gaze on him the whole way.

When he reached Steve’s splayed legs, he paused to consider logistics. He couldn’t use his hands either to support himself or to touch Steve. It would be easier if Steve could stand or even kneel, but the former was unrealistic in his condition and the latter unconscionable. He couldn’t ask Steve to kneel for him. 

Steve waited patiently. His expression was distantly curious, almost bored, as the Soldier leaned into the cradle of his hips. His dick was as limp as his unwashed hair, but that was expected. The Soldier had kept his damage in this area to a minimum after the first week or so, and all of it had healed by now, marks barely visible. Steve tensed as they were studied, doubtlessly remembering the last times anyone had paid attention to his groin. 

It strained his back to lean over this way, lancing pain through his damaged shoulder, but when the flat of his tongue curled under the head of Steve’s cock, it was worth it. Steve hissed like it hurt, but when his hands flew up to the Soldier’s head, chains rattling, he didn’t push him away. But he didn’t pull him closer, either, just seemed to need the option to act quickly and maintain control. He left them poised neutrally, fingertips lightly slipping through the strands of hair at the base of the Soldier’s skull, but not gripping.

The Soldier had many skills, most of them viciously honed. This was not one of them. He’d never done this before. He didn’t remember doing it, at any rate, and it felt strange. But between the various procedures and punishments he had experienced, he knew that his gag reflex was dull to nonexistent, and if he wasn’t completely sure what to do with his tongue, he knew that as soon as he brought Steve to hardness, there was one thing he could reliably try.

It took a while, despite the wet heat of the Soldier’s mouth and the clumsy attempts he made at finesse. Steve was in pretty rough shape, between the captivity, near-starvation, injuries, and drugs, and he hadn’t exactly been turned on before the Soldier had stuffed his face between his legs. And he was afraid. He was hiding it very well, but the Soldier knew fear, and he knew Steve by now, and he was far from relaxed, beyond wary. 

He dipped down farther, mouthing at the base. It brought him very close to the mess he’d left in Steve the night before, and whether Steve was hyperaware of that fact or just needed more distance between Call Me Jimmy and the place where he’d already been targeted for so much misery, he seemed unhappy with that maneuver. He jostled him slightly with his knee. 

The Soldier moved back up. Steve had flagged slightly during that exchange, so his guess was the latter. He caught the tip on his lips and slipped the half-hard length into his mouth, and he waited. Held it on his tongue and strained his neck to watch Steve’s face. 

Steve was staring back at him, but as he started to grow, he leaned his head back to the wall. He pulled his hands away from the Soldier’s head to leave them by his sides, palms flat on the floor.

It wasn’t particularly difficult to ease Steve into his throat, or even to keep him there, so he started from there and worked his way back up.

Steve was hot under him in a way unlike the furnace of his fevers. He was tensed with something other than expectation or pain or anger. It was selfish -- so incredibly selfish in a way that the Soldier had never even contemplated let alone attempted -- to do this to him. To make him feel something other than the misery and agony to which he’d become accustomed. It just made the rest stand out in sharper relief. He wanted to get his hands on him, but he had a feeling that even if they were available, part of the reason Steve had acquiesced in the first place was because they weren’t. 

He worked for a while, slowly, carefully, before he looked up at Steve again, past his heaving chest.

He was crying. Silent tears were slipping down his face, not many, not dramatically, but they were obvious. He didn’t seem aware of it. His face wasn’t twisting or crumpling, but it wasn’t slack with pleasure or tensed with anticipation either. He wasn’t wracked with sobs or holding them back. He was just blankly crying, staring ahead, completely disconnected from what was happening to his body. Or maybe not disconnected enough, and that was the problem.

He pulled away completely. Steve didn’t even react for a minute or two. By the time he seemed to realize that no one was touching him anymore, he’d already gone mostly limp.

An “I’m sorry” fluttered in his mouth, but he couldn’t release it. It seemed pathetically inadequate. He shouldn’t have done this, should have left well enough alone. He was just using him again.

The chains rattled. When he looked up, Steve was wiping his face with the back of his hand like he was surprised to find it wet. He steeled himself before he turned his attention on the Soldier.

His voice was level and blunt when he asked, “What about you?”

“What about me?” he asked sullenly. He’d enacted unspeakable violence on this man, and yet it was one failed blowjob that reminded him how wrong this all was?

“I can take care of that for you.”

His brow scrunched in confusion before he glanced down and noticed the bulge in his pants. Fuck. “You don’t have to. It’s fine. This was a bad idea.”

Steve raised an eyebrow at him before he rolled onto his hands and knees and advanced. He grabbed the front of the jacket and shoved, still strong enough to slow his fall but not enough to make it comfortable. The Soldier landed heavily on his back. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to,” Steve said, insinuating himself between his legs. He was steady, solid. Real. “But what do you want?”

He opened his mouth, inhaled the scent of Steve still clinging to his lips, and closed it again. He looked up at Steve looming over him, cock still glistening from the Soldier’s gamble and challenge in the set of his shoulders. Who was he to tell Steve what was good for him? Him, of all people? He’d done his level best to undo him all these weeks. He was the evil ruining him in the first place. He hadn’t put him in this position, but he was an implement of his torture. The absurdity of the Soldier determining what Steve could or couldn’t handle and dictating to him what he should be allowed to do with his own body … it was insane. He was entitled to a bad idea of his own choosing. 

He let his legs fall open around Steve and relaxed back into the floor.

Steve made short work of his fly, careful with the teeth of his zipper but otherwise business-like. He didn’t give himself time to think, or reconsider, or doubt, if he was inclined to do any of those things. He laid one palm heavily on the Soldier’s pelvis, leaned in close, and closed his lips around him.

He didn’t watch. It seemed like the wrong move to study him, like he deserved some privacy, and that was the moment the Soldier realized he’d fallen far too deep and had to figure something out. He let Steve use him to work out whatever was in his head and just hung on for the ride, enjoying the pleasure in a way he never had on any of his rounds. This was different. He couldn’t really tell himself that Steve had chosen this. At least in his head, he knew the truth. He was using Steve, manipulating him, coercing him. It was just another version of the same. But it felt different, and after he acknowledged the voice that told him he was full of shit, he shut it the fuck up and let himself be washed out with the tide. His mouth felt so good, so deceptively simple and easy.

When he was close, so close that the plateau was on the horizon, he murmured breathlessly, “Hey. Hey, Steve.”

Steve pulled away. He kept one hand on him to finish him off, but he leaned well back when the Soldier shot off. Satisfied that he’d done the polite thing, the Soldier closed his eyes again to feel and not think for a while more. After a few minutes of no sounds, no movement, he opened them again.

Steve was white as a sheet. He’d avoided most of the ejaculate, but a few dribbles ran down his hand, and he stared at them, nose wrinkling and mind working. It was such an odd expression. If the Soldier didn’t know any better, he’d say Steve was tasting the air almost like a snake. 

Lead dropped into his stomach as he realized. That was exactly what Steve was doing. The Soldier’s senses were enhanced slightly, and he’d bet anything that Steve’s were, too. It was possible, and even more probable, that sitting around covered in come for weeks on end was just making him acutely uncomfortable with this fresh batch. But the look of suspicious, disturbed familiarity, like he’d almost connected two thoughts so disparate that he’d never considered them in this light before, was too real.

He recognized the smell. He had to. It was the same smell the Soldier had been leaving all over him every night. He practically bathed in it at this point. It hung in the air constantly. With his enhancements, careful diet regimen, and the cocktail of drugs they pumped into him daily, the Soldier wouldn’t be surprised if its smell was as distinct as he was.

He shook his head like a dog and wiped his hand on the Soldier’s pants quickly, wincing in apology. Steady fingers tucked the Soldier back into his pants and did up the fly.

The Soldier opened his mouth to say something, anything, not sure how to approach Steve as he moved away.

Steve quirked a tense, lopsided smile at him. “Coulda used some gum now, huh.”

The Soldier nodded, dazed.

As though nothing had changed, Steve started up his usual conversational material -- the outside world, mainly, with scattered questions about the layout of this base, guard rotations, weapons he might have seen seen, trying to prompt him to give up anything useful. 

Despite that, the Soldier could have sworn Steve’s penetrating gaze lingered where his metal arm was strapped across his chest.


	8. Chapter 8

Sleep eluded the Soldier. It happened only rarely, a fluke in that stretch of time between his body’s tolerance of the drugs increasing and the techs noticing. He’d grown accustomed to the ambient sounds and smells of the lab in much the same way: hushed conversations, isopropyl, the soft hum of equipment, the latex from their gloves …

The musky aftershave and rattling keys were out of place.

“So you got him a pet.”

It took him a moment to match the voice to Rumlow, and when he did, he very nearly gave up the ghost. He hid the abortive motion and the way he’d almost opened his eyes by rolling over and fluttering them, as though deep in a dream.

“I don’t follow.”

“He ain’t gonna do it. He’s soft with Rogers, and you know it.”

“The Soldier’s progress reports differ from yours significantly.”

“He’s lying.”

“The Soldier doesn’t lie. He isn’t capable.”

A disgusted scoff. A booted toe nudging his prone form. “I think he’s capable of more than you think. I think you’re getting scammed. Just let me handle this.” Knuckles grazing his cheek. A thumb tracing his lips.

He bit his tongue.

“You don’t know what we know. If you did, you would see the beauty of this.”

“The only beautiful thing in this plan is Rogers on his knees. Everything else is going to hell. He needs to be taught a lesson. Both of them. And the Soldier ain’t gonna teach himself. Take a look at Rogers after the Soldier’s done with him. Take a real look. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. He’ll still fight you. Was that in your plan this far out?”

There was a long pause before the other voice responded, during which the Soldier’s heart was lodged in his throat. “We have ways of dealing with the Soldier when he gets … unruly.”

Heavy footfalls led out of the lab before he could hear more.

So his superiors still weren’t confident in his conviction. They still had doubts. Rumlow was circling them in the tall grass. They’d stopped sending him out on missions already. They didn’t bother to hide their knowing glances or thinning patience. He wasn’t surprised, not really. He had known this would come.

The specter of the chair had loomed over him for as long as he could remember, but the lead ball his stomach became when he thought about it was now met by a more acute terror. If they put him in that chair, what would happen to Rogers? Who would they send in his place? Would someone else gain his trust only to break his heart while the Soldier continued to slip in and terrorize him at night? Would they wipe him every time?

He couldn’t tell which thought frightened him more, but it left him no choice. He needed to see Rogers again, and dire as Rogers’ situation was, he was still better off in the Soldier’s hands.

He’d put this off because he hated doing it, even to the other prisoners, even when he’d been a machine, but he knew what he had to do. The satisfaction on their faces when he requested the supplies he would need said it all. He’d made the right call.

As always, Rogers looked like hell when he walked in. He took a moment to breathe, to think. To prepare.

It was a relief that he had just enough lube left for this, but he’d be out after tonight. He didn’t dare ask for more. Not with the way the winds were shifting.

He flattened his palms over Rogers’ hips the same way he did every night, still feeling for his condition. Maybe he was was putting off the inevitable. What he really wanted was to run his hands down his back, down his thighs, search out all the soft places and shield them.

Rogers didn’t want to be touched, though. Not really. Not even with kindness. Perhaps especially not with kindness. Definitely not by him. What Rogers wanted mattered very little, really. But it mattered to the Soldier. Just because he had his orders didn’t mean he should indulge his ridiculous desires as though by virtue of having power, he also had the right.

He didn’t. This was wrong. It was _wrong_. Nothing the officers claimed could justify this. Not anymore. But it was where they were. There was no easy or obvious way out. Only through.

He pulled on the thick rubber glove first, all the way up to the elbow. It was tricky to tug over the plates and ridges of his arm, especially without tearing it, but he managed. When it was in place, he poured the last of his lube over it.

It was remarkable, really, the capacity of the human body. Truly remarkable. Rogers struggled in his bonds when he realized what was happening, but it didn’t change anything. He went slowly, but that didn’t mean he eased Rogers into it.

When he’d gone as far as he dared, his free hand drew the stun baton from his belt. He started at Rogers’ feet and worked his way up. The pressure sensors of his arm told him how effective the shocks were. Before long, sweat was beading on Rogers’ neck and he was jerking in the chains.

He went long past the point where he thought he’d done enough. If this didn’t prove this job belonged to him, then there would be no point in having done it at all. He had to get it right the first time.

God, he didn’t want there to be a second time.

By the time he was done, Rogers’ muscles had tensed so badly from the repeated shocks that sliding his hand out was an unpleasant struggle. He sighed. With a swift jerk, it came free. Rogers tried to curl in on himself, barely making it more than an inch.

So much for doing minimal damage.

He swallowed bile and counted to ten before he opened his pants.

Nothing happened. He stroked himself, rubbed off on Rogers’ back, spit in his hand and tried again, and … absolutely nothing.

Not even a twitch.

For maybe the first time since they’d begun using the Soldier for this purpose, or at least the first time in a very long while, he couldn’t get hard. Looking at Rogers only made it worse, made it feel like he’d never achieve a satisfactory erection ever again. It didn’t seem like the worst prospect, honestly. He’d be able to rest. He wouldn’t have to do this anymore. To anyone.

Would they know? If he didn’t finish, would they realize? Rogers’ ass was a mess. He was covered in burns. Surely that was enough. Did he really need to use him on top of damaging and degrading him?

He knew the answer was yes. They’d know. Somehow, they’d know. And if they suspected that he hadn’t been able or had refused to perform, then they might suspect why, and then this, once again, would have been pointless.

He swore, loud and long and vicious, until he could collect himself. The Soldier wasn’t prone to bursts of emotion, but he’d done so many things he wasn’t prone to because of this man.

He blew out a hard breath through his nose and tried again.

After a couple of fruitless minutes, he realized that making him wait like this, knowing he wasn’t alone, wondering what came next and when it would end, was probably crueler than the alternative. He slid the baton inside him, not with purpose or overt force, more as a placeholder. A silent message that, no, he wasn’t done, more was coming, but the hard part was over.

Desperation made him dig deep. Steve against him, hot and solid, almost got movement, but he’d been so sick and miserable. He couldn’t ignore that for long. A brief stirring, but nothing substantial. He sighed. Steve under him, then. The velvety feel of his dick, his hands cradling the base of his skull, the intense way he’d stared at him before he’d let his head fall back.

The way he’d cried, devastating in his silence, his quietly understated wretchedness, with the Soldier’s lips still stretching wide around him. Cried and waited for it to be over for who knew how long before the Soldier had noticed.

Damn it. _Damn it._

Okay. Fine. He hadn’t wanted to do this, but if that’s what it took …

Steve’s mouth around him was seared into his brain. There was nothing complicated about that, right? Nothing but the obvious. He’d ignored it at the time. He could ignore it now. His tongue working with more skill than the Soldier had been able to muster, firm and confident. He’d done that before, clearly. Hopefully in better circumstances.

Rumlow had wanted his mouth.

_Fuck._

He couldn’t stop himself. Before he even realized what he was doing, he’d rested his forehead between Steve’s shoulder blades, above the patch. It was so many levels of wrong to draw comfort from him because he couldn’t get it up, even though it was, perversely, in Rogers’ best interest that he manage to. Probably even worse than using the memory of his mouth to work himself up to fuck him against his will.

He flopped onto his ass and leaned against Rogers’ side, still idly stroking himself without much expectation. If Steve almost willingly between his legs wasn’t getting it done, it stood to reason that nothing would.

God, the way Steve had looked at him just before he’d opened his mouth, the ghost of something --

\-- _sharp humor in his eyes, like he was in on a joke that only he understood; soft blond hair flopping forward over his brow. It had dried wrong and was sticking up everywhere. He reached out to run his fingers through the clean, fluffy strands, and Steve let him, tilted his narrow, angular face into his hand like a cat, eyes closing with languid pleasure. His other hand went to Steve’s taut lips, to graze his thumb over them, under his chin, over his throat._

_His hands. His warm, soft, flesh hands. Both of them._

He panted, shaking and frightened. That -- Steve had lost weight, but he wasn’t that skinny, wasn’t that clean, that careless and joyful and _free_. And. His hands. His _hands._

He didn’t have to give it any more thought for the moment. He swallowed a few times, collecting himself.

He was hard.

* * *

 

They waited longer to send him back in. He tried to lose himself in the routine and distract himself. He’d heard people pray in the moments preceding their deaths, usually at his hand, and while he didn’t know if some scrap of him between wipes had ever believed, he considered giving it a shot. In the end he didn’t, but it was a narrow thing.

When they finally led him to the round room, he could have wept in relief. They trusted him. They believed he could do this. No one else would touch Steve for the time being.

He watched Steve carefully. He was sitting up, but the Soldier recognized, from the handful of other prisoners he’d been ordered to punish in that way, the look of sickly pain churning through his gut every time he moved, that type of hurt that sent messages up to the brain that something was very wrong.

He’d live. That was all that mattered at the moment.

The way Steve was looking at him … All the anxiety and uncertainty and the guilt came to a head. The coldness and precision the Winter Soldier was infamous for melted away in the inferno of his racing thoughts.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” burst out of him before he could contain it.

Steve made a sound like he might be laughing, but it was choked out of him. “What?”

“You keep talking about this friend, this Bucky guy. You talk about him a lot for a guy you were just friends with. My old friend this, my old friend that.” When Steve stayed silent, he elaborated. “When you were … When you were going on, you called him Bucky.”

_Called me Bucky._

Steve blinked.

“Were you sleeping with him?”

“Jesus,” Steve muttered, shaking his head. He looked heavenward like a solution would reveal itself. “The hell kind of question is that?”

He didn’t even blame him, really. Here he was making demands of him again. This was ridiculous. A ridiculous line of questioning, ridiculous timing. He knew what he sounded like. He sounded like a jealous lover. They weren’t lovers. What the fuck was wrong with him?

Still …

“An honest one,” he said.

Steve’s expression darkened, his posture closed. “No.”

He didn’t know why he couldn’t stop himself, but his mouth kept running just as surely as muscle memory carried him through his missions, and it had very little to do with what his brain was telling him to do. He wasn’t even sure if Steve was answering his question or refusing to participate altogether, but he plowed ahead anyway. “You sure about that? Maybe you just wanted to. You never watched him and wondered?”

“Knock it off.”

“You remember his voice so damn well, you never touched yourself thinking about your name on his tongue?” He laughed wildly. “My tongue. You said if you close your eyes, I’m him. Why don’tcha close ‘em, Steve. Go ahead.”

Steve’s eyes flashed. “I’m not gonna tell you again.”

He could feel himself pulling away, as though a drawbridge between them was going up, as though the room were lengthening until Steve was just a dot on the horizon. A corona of righteous, indignant fury and hurt. Miles of chasm stretching between them. “Maybe you were afraid to take it that far. You didn’t touch yourself. You’d wrap your hand around your pencils and channel that hard-on into your sketches, wouldn’t you?”

He was charged up, ready to keep going, out for blood with no idea why, but the air changed and knocked the wind out of his sails.

Steve’s mouth opened in a way that would have been comical if the whole situation weren’t so goddamn fucked up. There was no power behind it when he spoke, breathless with astonishment. “I didn’t tell you I’m an artist.”

The Soldier froze. “Of course you did,” he forced out. “Sure you did. You -- you told me.”

“No, I didn’t,” Steve said firmly. “I don’t know what I told you while I was delirious, but I can tell you it wasn’t that.”

“How would you know? You have no idea the shit you told me. You poured your pulsing, bleeding heart out all over me.”

“I just know,” he whispered. His voice strengthened. “I haven’t picked up a sketchbook in almost two years. I’ve had a lot of thoughts the past few weeks, lot of thoughts, but I can promise you that that has not been one of them.”

“So what difference does it make?”

Steve was silent for a stretch of seconds so long, the Soldier prickled with doubt. Steve was clearly deliberating with all the gravity of a man who knew his next determination would carry weight. Finally, when he spoke, his tone had changed. He sounded like he had that first day, calm in that measured way like when he’d asked the Soldier if he needed help. “They messed with your head, didn’t they. Jimmy’s a made-up name. You picked it because you don’t know who you are.”

He scoffed in anger, barely listening even as a chill slashed across him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know who you are.”

“You don’t even know how to escape,” he spat. “You’ve schemed for weeks, and nothing, _nothing’s_ come of it. You’re just a broken shell of a prisoner, trapped and doomed and losing his damn mind. Imagining things. Desperate for some fragile human connection to take the pain away.”

 _“I know_ who you are,” he repeated, voice rising, building up momentum.

There was a sound in the Soldier’s ears like steam hissing out of a kettle. Rogers couldn’t be stopped any more than he could have.

“You have gaps, you said. But you’re Sergeant James Barnes of the one-oh-seventh. Of the Howling Commandos. My second-in-command.” His voice broke. “My friend--”

“Stop it--”

“They think sending you in here will rattle me--”

“I said shut up---”

“They want you to get me to tell you things, information I wouldn’t normally give up. Information that would hurt people I care about, probably countless others. I can’t do that. But I can give you information, Buck. There are things I can tell you.”

“They broke you. Fuck, they really broke you.”

“Bucky Barnes from Flatbush. Your dad was a photographer. Your ma worked at her family’s print shop.”

“Damn it, Rogers--”

“You swept the floors on the weekends. They had you doing the books when you turned fourteen because you’ve always had a head for numbers.”

“Fuck--”

“You can do it now, can’t you? They can mess with your memory, but what’s eighty-six times thirty-five?” He paused. “You’ve got it already, don’t you? It’s three thousand ten. That’s an easy one. If you had a rifle in your hands, I bet you could calculate the shot with the wind and the trajectory no sweat. You remember that?”

He’d had a rifle in his hands just a few weeks ago. Part of him wanted to spit that at him, vicious and ugly. But he knew he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Why couldn’t he?

“You braided your sisters’ hair every Saturday, and you let them put makeup on you. You couldn’t draw worth a damn every time I stuck a pencil in your hand, but you could sing, and you loved music.”

“Just -- just stop it.” All the fight went out of him. “I’m not your Bucky. My name’s not--”

_\--James -- don’t call me James anymore, Ma, it’s Bucky._

He surged forward, burying his face between his knees and pressing until his ears throbbed. His head ached, his throat squeezing tight. Maintenance. He was supposed to tell maintenance. He was supposed to--

“We went to war together,” Steve was saying, his voice hazy and indistinct, like the Soldier was slipping underwater. Like the downy cotton feel in the last seconds before the ice pulled him down. “We went to school together. I slept on your floor. You sat at my mother’s kitchen table while she picked gravel out of your hands from when you got your ass kicked going after some creeps I’d lost a fight to.”

“You sure lose a lot of fights,” he pushed past chattering teeth. “Must be how you ended up here.”

“You had every mother charmed and every father spitting nails, and the hell of it is, you didn’t even try anything. You were a perfect gentleman. You kissed ‘em at the door and went home every time.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Winter Soldier must’ve fucked you stupid. Pounded the sense right out of you.”

“I pulled you off a table in a slave-labor factory, and you marched by my side all the way out of enemy territory and then right back into a warzone.”

“That’s not--”

“I loved you. And I love you now. You’re Bucky Barnes, damn it.” He huffed, loud and fierce. “You’re Bucky, and you deserve better than this. _You’re_ better than this.”

“Stop,” he said weakly. “Just. You can tell me about your friend. But I’m not him. You have to accept that. Your mind’s just playing tricks on you.”

He didn’t know what kind of pathetic picture he presented, but Steve softened and pulled himself upright, pausing to lean against the wall and clutch his stomach before he caught his breath and walked over. The Soldier realized, as Steve ambled over with both hands on the wall for support, that he’d barely seen Steve stand at all in the last week. Maybe longer. He moved stiffly, careful and pained, silent and grim-lipped.

He sat heavily beside the Soldier, panting for a minute. It couldn’t be comfortable, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He leaned close, until their shoulders touched, and then he turned, nudging the Soldier until he reciprocated. In a way, once they were solidly pressed back to back, it was easier. He could listen, but he didn’t have to see. Rogers dropped his head back onto the Soldier’s shoulder, and after a few minutes, the Soldier did the same.

He didn’t know how long they sat that way, heads together, no space between them, Steve’s voice in his ear recounting a life he couldn’t have led with a man whose very presence set his mind into overdrive.

He only hoped, as the gas flooded the room, that it wouldn’t look too suspicious when they slumped over together.


	9. Chapter 9

_I can give you information, Buck._

Steve’s voice bounced around his skull from the moment he woke in the lab. Once again, the Soldier had all the power, and Steve still seemed to get the upper hand. The Soldier wondered how long Steve had been sitting on that one. On the one hand, he’d clearly been wise to their plan from the beginning, which at least explained why they’d gotten exactly nowhere with it. But they had to have anticipated that that’s how he would react to it, that he wouldn’t really reveal anything useful, so why even bother with that tactic? They’d said themselves that they knew he was smart and difficult to deceive.

On the other hand, how long had he been convinced of his absurd connection to the Soldier? If he was so smart, why was he falling for that one? This organization’s reach went very deep. If there was information to use against someone, they’d find it. They’d know about this … Sergeant Barnes and his connection to Captain Rogers -- Captain America, Rumlow had called him that once, that seemed important -- and could easily turn that to their advantage. For all the Soldier knew, they’d changed his appearance to look like this man somewhere along the way. Maybe this wasn’t even his face. Steve had to have considered that.

A bizarre, errant thought crossed his mind as he backtracked and tried to decide when this experiment had gone off the rails. When Rogers had helped him piss, he’d looked -- not stared, not really, but he’d definitely been filing something away. Steve hadn’t really answered his question about whether or not he and this Barnes guy had fucked, but if the certainty with which he’d blown him had been any indication … maybe he thought he’d recognized him. That was ridiculous, of course. Who’d recognize their old friend’s penis in a situation like that? The man had had other pressing concerns on his mind.

But if he was already looking out for similarities -- and based on some of the more leading questions Steve had asked that hadn’t meant much at the time, he’d probably been searching for them all along -- then it was just one more, wasn’t it? And if they’d been lovers, then it wasn’t so outlandish a way to recognize someone, was it? But not the kind of thing that would be faked like a face could be. Steve would have thought of that. He was certain of it.

But a dick was a dick, really. They weren’t that special. It was a pretty shaky thing to base a theory on, at any rate, no matter how well you thought you knew someone.

And the rest … This had happened before, when he’d been out of cryo for long enough. It didn’t mean that Rogers’ words had affected him. It just meant that he was getting antsy. Rogers was wrong. It was tragic, really. A tragic misunderstanding, a befitting end for a tragic situation.

The knowing looks followed him back to the lab, through his exam, training, all the way to his rounds. He was so desperate to find the line where they would be satisfied, and it seemed they kept moving it. Snippets of conversation filtered through the building. He gathered that something big was going to happen soon. Someone named Fury seemed to be causing a lot of headaches for them and would need to be eliminated, and they were frustrated that the Soldier wasn’t available to deal with him, frustrated that something seemed to be taking too long.

Compromised. They’d called him compromised. He could it admit it. He was compromised. But why hadn’t they wiped him yet, then? He had no way of remembering their protocols where he was concerned, but he was certain he’d been wiped regularly before they’d begun using him as their prisoner-wrangler. He knew the cons: that it was lengthy and time-consuming, involved a large number of specialized personnel, and rendered him completely useless for some time to recover before he could do what they needed. Useless for certain missions, period, with no capacity for subtlety and limited thought. When they’d started sending him out at night to deal with their prisoners, he’d already been kept busy enough gearing up for whatever their grand plan was that they hadn’t wanted to use that time for maintenance procedures. Maybe it was sloppy and ill-advised, but it had worked well enough until they’d sicced him on Captain Steve Rogers.

That look reappeared outside the round room, the look and an ugly smirk. The Soldier didn’t give it much thought. He was used to sneering, contemptuous faces, reminders of the lowly status he occupied for people too confident in his submissiveness to be terrified of what he could do to them.

His eyes slipped closed as he crossed the threshold, remembering Steve’s back against his, what it meant. That full body contact, firm and warm and freely given.

Freely given to Bucky Barnes, a man who wasn’t there. Never to the Soldier. Rogers was delusional.

The expanse of his back was fully defenseless as usual when the Soldier’s eyes opened, frozen in place by the door while he considered how he would need to do this and convinced his feet to move. Miles of naked skin dirty as ever, shoulders awkwardly forced back and up, filthy hair falling across his vulnerable neck --

His hair. The Soldier could see his hair. There was no hood.

Steve was shifting restlessly, trying to turn around now that the door had opened, but with his arms up like that, he couldn’t see behind him.

“’Bout time,” Steve was saying. It was bitten off and tense, but it wasn’t frightened.

Hearing his voice like this was so jarringly out of place that it took him a second to react. He ran over and slapped his hand over Steve’s mouth anyway, wrapped his other arm around his neck and squeezed, pressed his forehead into the back of Steve’s head to keep him still. Steve struggled, weak but energized with opportunity and purpose. He tried to turn around, to throw his body weight forward and drag the Soldier with him, to twist any way he could, but eventually he went slack. It was difficult to fake true unconsciousness, though, and the Soldier hung on until he could tell that it was genuine.

His heart hammered in his ears as he checked that Steve was still breathing, relief flooding through him as light breaths ghosted over the back of his hand.

It was possible that someone had screwed up, that they hadn’t meant to expose him. But he remembered the look the guard had given him, and he didn’t think so. This was intentional. They wanted this finished. This was the beginning of the end. They wanted Steve to know the truth, and there could only be one reason for that. Either they were throwing subtlety out the window or they were done with Steve entirely.

And if Steve knew … If Steve knew …

He didn’t want Steve to know. Steve was horribly mistaken, made him uncomfortable and put him on edge sometimes with his mere presence, like the pins and needles of a waking limb, but there was something about him that the Soldier drank in like water. He wasn’t worthy of Steve’s trust, but being on the receiving end of it was heady and intoxicating. He wanted to keep it.

He wanted to earn it, have it for real, just for him, but that wasn’t possible. He knew that.

And if Steve knew, then the next step was … whatever else they had planned for him. They were removing the Soldier from the equation.

Call Me Jimmy’s days were numbered.

What that meant for the Soldier, he wasn’t quite sure yet.

* * *

 

“Had a visit from Rumlow,” Steve said coolly. It was almost casual. “He seemed irritated about something.”

He’d watched for some change in Steve, anything to indicate that he’d almost glimpsed the Winter Soldier, maybe more questions, but there was nothing. Steve had compartmentalized it away like everything else. The only proof was the ugly ring of bruises across his throat, the slight rasp in his voice.

“Never really talked to him,” he replied. It was true. Rumlow did all the talking during their rare encounters. “Wouldn’t know the difference.”

His eyes narrowed, voice bone dry as he continued. “He seems to think that the Winter Soldier has a crush on me. I think he’s almost jealous.”

The Soldier froze. “What’d you tell him?”

“I told him he was welcome to pass him a love note and get pounded.”

That startled a laugh out of him. “Jesus, Steve. Going a little off-book there.”

Of course, if Rumlow was jealous of anything, it was of what the Winter Soldier did to Steve. The animal thirst with which he lusted after Steve was obvious. He didn’t even really try to hide it. Steve had to know that.

Steve shrugged. “I threw politeness out the window after he tried to kill me. Just seemed silly.”

The Soldier studied Steve, the relative ease of his shoulders and the loose posture. He was absolutely certain that he was trapped in a room with Bucky Barnes, that that made him safe, and now that he’d admitted it, he was trying his best to convince him. Story after story, trivial detail after trivial detail, Steve gave life to the memory of his friend and overwhelmed him with it like a tidal wave, trying desperately to spark something in the dark cave of the Soldier’s mind.

They’d been disappointed after his last visit. They hadn’t expected him to immediately choke Rogers unconscious to avoid being identified, and with a hand on his throat, they let him know this. It was instinct, he told them, simple reflex. But he knew what they wanted now.

Steve was wrong to sit so openly for him, so near and trusting. He was wrong in every way. But this trust, this uncomplicated loyalty, had tantalized him from the start, been exactly what he feared and wanted most, and now that he had it, he wanted to enjoy it. Wanted to hold it in his toxic hands and breathe it in. This would be the last time. He was certain of it. He’d screwed up for the last time, and now he might never see Steve again. In fact, he knew he wouldn’t. At least not like this. They’d called his bluff. He couldn’t fathom why they’d sent him back in, but he couldn’t waste it wondering what would happen next.

This was what it felt like to have Steve Rogers’ love, and the warmth of it seared the shame from him as he basked in its light. This didn’t belong to him. He wasn’t worthy, wasn’t deserving. But he hoped that Bucky Barnes, wherever he was, if he was even alive, had appreciated it when it had been focused on him. This stolen affection was his for the taking, and he wanted it, and with the end near, he let himself have it. Let himself drink in the rich sound of Steve’s voice and the power of his undivided attention like he’d waited a lifetime for it.

“I’m not your friend,” he said with no heat, just for his conscience.

“Bucky had a scar on the inside of his left thigh,” Steve said without missing a beat. He coughed. “You got one of those?”

He had so many of those. What would a single one prove on the terrain map of the Soldier’s aching body?

“I’d say he was almost disappointed,” he continued seamlessly. “Seems like something’s coming down the pike. Any ideas?”

The Soldier was out of ideas. He was out of time.

* * *

 

He resigned himself to never seeing Steve Rogers again, memorized his face knowing that he would forget it soon, and then prepared himself to be led to the room with the chair.

He was not prepared to be led to the round room. If they didn’t think he could do this, then why were they so insistent that he keep trying? What result were they hoping to achieve? How could they possibly hope for something different?

For the first time, his orders were specific, resounding in his head, digging in sharply and throbbing when he thought about disobeying. There was no room to reinterpret them and no time to process.

His fists clenched as the door was opened, mind racing with all kinds of possibilities except the one that he should have seen coming. But even though he didn’t expect what greeted him, he wasn’t surprised. Just cold and resigned.

“No…”

The moment he was through the door, Steve’s eyes locked on his. Then they drifted to his arm, filling with a horrified understanding that made his lungs crumple in his chest. He was against the far wall where he always was. Everything was the same except for how they were now profoundly, irrevocably different.

Steve swallowed, over and over. Hard to say whether he was struggling to speak or quelling nausea. It could have been both, of course. The Soldier waited. When he didn’t move, the horror melted into a sadness that was even worse. Steve was so careful with his emotions, and to see naked anguish pour from him felt so wrong, so unreal.

“So this is how it is?” he finally asked, voice dull and at odds with his expression. There was a wave of something rising in him, something the Soldier couldn’t identify, but it looked a lot like … grief? Grief that looked familiar on his face, like he’d seen it before.

“I didn’t want it to be you,” Steve whispered. It was hard to tell whether he was truly shocked or just wanted to be, but the sickened betrayal was very real. “Thought I was finally losing my mind when I started to think about it. Couldn’t be you. Didn’t make sense. Made too much sense. Thought I had to be wrong. God, Buck.”

He took a step forward.

“No.” Steve clutched at the wall to pull himself clumsily to his feet. “Don’t do this.”

He took another step, forcing himself along like the gravity was turned up.

“What did they do to you? What happened?”

The Soldier could see the exact moment when Steve realized that there was nothing he could say that would change his orders. His eyes slipped closed for a brief second, but when they opened, they were stone.

His fists clenched. “Don’t touch me.”

He advanced steadily now, slow and focused, stalking like the predator he’d been all along. It was over. Steve didn’t have a chance.

A practiced lunge had him on top of Steve, who simply didn’t have the strength to withstand it. As he toppled down, he twisted and wrapped his chains around the Soldier’s neck, using his momentum to pull them taut. It was an impressive effort, but the angle was wrong and the Soldier jerked the chains away like he was plucking an errant piece of lint. Steve drove his knee up into the Soldier’s crotch, but the Soldier blocked it easily with his thigh. He managed to slide out from beneath him, throwing the length of the chains like a whip, but they glanced off of his metal arm with a clang and no real consequence. He grabbed Steve’s ankle and pulled.

All told, it was a brief fight, ugly and unfair, but Steve didn’t make it easy. He was panting by the time the Soldier had him pinned, forced flat with the full weight of the Soldier’s body pressing him into the floor from behind.

He’d been right from the start. Steve was a fighter, and a smart one, too. It just didn’t matter anymore.

A rush of frenzied energy passed over Steve when the Soldier unzipped. When he pressed down harder into Steve to still him, he was surprised to find himself half-hard already.

Somehow, it was easier this way. It was honest, subduing him by force. This would happen, but then it would be over, and there would be no more lies. It was as freeing as it was damning.

If he had to do this, though, then he knew something else he had to do. For this last time, he had to look him in the eye. Had to confront what he was doing and make it real. He waited for Steve to tire himself out and stop struggling, a patient, unshakable, oppressive force against him. Finally, when Steve’s hands shook from exhaustion, he rolled him onto his back.

Steve immediately covered his face with his arms, a broken sound of pure devastation tearing from his throat, misery ringing in the Soldier’s ears like it could rupture his eardrums with the force. It was unlike anything he could have imagined from Steve before. It was inhuman.

He forced one of Steve’s legs up and out, bent at the knee, and pressed closer. Pried his arms away and grasped his wrists in his metal hand to hold them down over his head.

He didn’t drag it out any more than he had to. He watched Steve’s face as he navigated the awkward angle and drove into him. Tears slipped freely down his temples, into his hair, but he was quiet now. Blood dripped down his chin from where his lip had split. His eyes were open, accusing and furious, until the Soldier’s hand reached between them, almost of its own accord, and squeezed.

Steve protested weakly, tried to squirm away, but as he thickened in the Soldier’s hand, his eyes closed. He turned his face into his arm and dug his teeth into his bicep to ride it out.

When it was over, he dropped Steve’s wrists like he was on fire, pulled his sticky hand from his groin to wipe it on his pants, and stood quickly. Steve didn’t move at first, just watched the Soldier adjust his clothes and go to the door.

Just before the it opened, he asked, not even looking up, “Are your duties done for the night?”

The Soldier was spared from having to answer. He didn’t look back.

* * *

 

He tried to carry himself like the Winter Soldier, like the machine he’d inhabited for so long, but it was useless. The best he could manage was utter defeat, but that seemed to appease his masters just fine.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the bone-weary, wounded look of betrayal on Steve’s face when the Soldier’d made him come. Why had he done that? He couldn’t even tell if he’d been trying to hurt him, or control him, or remind him of something. To punish him for trusting him at all, or maybe it had just been a purely selfish impulse gone horribly wrong, trying to make an ugly thing better. But it was done now. Steve knew the truth.

There was nothing left to do but wait for the culling.

Surely, they’d purge Steve from his mind, from this earth, and he would return to his work blanketed in the fog of ignorance he’d called home for so many years. This excruciating exercise in futility, this nonsensical power struggle, would end. He continued through his normal routine with the certainty of his deserved fate hanging over him, as well as the uncertainty of Steve’s.

And then the next morning, they sent him back in. His feet dragged. With Steve all caught up and Call Me Jimmy effectively dead, there was only one reason to see him again, and he didn’t know if he could do it. He had the sense, as they shoved him along, that he was no longer a tool in this equation. He was being punished as well.

Steve was upright and stiff against the far wall when they shoved him in, but with no ruse to uphold, the Soldier kept his feet under him. He looked away quickly. The slam of the door reverberated through him like a shot. Like a volley of rifles being cocked for his execution by firing squad.

If only.

Steve, on the other hand, had no trouble looking him in the eye. It was almost like that first day they’d sent him in, when he’d held himself like a political prisoner certain of his convictions and righteousness and not like a man who’d just violently met the business end of an unlubed dick. Chin up and out defiantly, breaths even, shoulders back. Like no time had passed, like he hadn’t been dragged as low as he could go. But it was an illusion. All these weeks were written all over him, in the hollows where muscle had been and the marks that his overtaxed body could no longer heal properly and the cold _anger_ he didn’t even try to hide. The Soldier had been changed even more thoroughly, a painful metamorphosis that he wasn’t sure his weary skeleton could even support for much longer.

Voice steady and low as the purr of an idling engine, he asked, “Are you here to violate my trust or my body? What’s it gonna be, Buck -- more lies or more rape?”

He turned around and pressed his forehead into the wall, growling in powerless frustration. Steve’s patience was endless and barbed.

Finally, he turned back. “I can’t be who you think I am,” he said quietly. “I’m not that person. I’m barely a person. You don’t understand.”

“I understand plenty. ‘They send me, I go.’ ‘He does what he’s told.’ You were honest, right at the outset.” His laugh felt wrong, like icy, slithering fingers trailing down the Soldier’s skin. “So this is what you do … when you’re not with me. What you’ve been doing all this time. Murdering and raping. You come to me stinking of sex, and that’s why.”

“Yes.”

“What you’ve been doing to me, there are others.”

He shifted, pinned in place by Steve’s stare and unable to look away now that he’d made the mistake of looking up. “I -- yes. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly.” It didn’t sound like a question, but he answered anyway.

“You were special. In a lot of ways. My orders have been different with you from the start.” He hesitated. “You’re different.”

“Not everyone got the VIP treatment? Did I get the better or worse end of that?”

He slid to the floor on his knees. Steve tracked him smoothly, not breaking contact even for a moment. “Much worse. I didn’t -- I haven’t enjoyed this. That doesn’t make it better. I know it’s selfish to point it out, like it should matter to you. But I want you to know that.”

Steve finally looked away, unreadable as always. When he looked back, shutters closing to wait out the coming storm, it was his turn to lower his gaze. “I forgive you. But I don’t want to see you right now. I understand that you can’t leave yet. That this plays out. So I’m going to turn around, and you do what you’re going to do.”

Without so much as a moment to see the impact of his words, he turned as he’d said he would, lying down flat with his face in his arms.

He was so tired. So, so tired, so ready for this to be over. They would punish him if he didn’t perform, but punishment loomed on the horizon no matter what, and regardless of whatever else might be uncertain, a wipe was imminent. Steve wouldn’t even be a memory once he was dead and the Soldier was sliding his knife into his next target. If he refused, what more could they do to him?

The answer curdled in his mouth before he’d even finished his thought. Nothing. They could do nothing to him. Nothing of consequence, nothing that would carry with him through the wipe. But they could do anything to Steve.

He couldn’t condemn Steve to whatever else they might concoct just because he’d turned squeamish. He’d already done this plenty of times before. What difference did it really make to the bloody mural of his soul to do it again? What was the point of everything else he’d done if he didn’t see this through?

The farce would continue.

He stood slowly, footsteps careful. Steve shuddered when he approached, and then he was still again.

It was cowardly to be so afraid of this exposure when Steve was naked as always below him, but he was careful as he drew his cock from his fly, certain that if he had too much skin-on-skin contact then he might shake apart and never get it up at all. As it was, just to achieve something he had to find the least blemished skin he could -- the back of Steve’s thigh, up high where it met his ass -- and slide against it, blocking out everything but the raw sensation of warmth that wasn’t his hand. Steve didn’t react.

Guilt gnawed at his throat for dragging this out, but that pitiful, selfish voice in his head, the one Steve had breathed life into, hoped that Steve could feel how difficult it was for him to get hard, how long it was taking, that he would believe how much he didn’t want this either.

Like that mattered.

It seemed to take forever, but eventually he managed, stabbing into him because being gentle could only wound more at this point. Mercy had no place here. He was mechanical, blocking out everything that wasn’t the tightness and heat clutching at him. Every time he thought he’d built up a rhythm and might get closer, he’d get distracted by a bruise here, a scar there, and have to will his treacherous mind back below the water level just to keep from slipping out entirely.

Finally, Steve shifted under him, adjusting the spread of his arms, the set of his shoulders. It unintentionally pushed his hips back against the Soldier, clenched him tighter around him for a few seconds.

His breath caught. Steve froze, tensing again before he slumped back into the pillow of his arms and swallowed loud and rough. “Did they do this to you,” he said. His voice was quiet and flat, barely real, but it vibrated up his palms where they lay against him anyway. “What you’re doing to me. Did they do this.”

He felt absurd freezing up like that, still inside him, but it was as automatic as the way his cock jumped at the sound of Steve’s voice. Empty and weak, he answered, “I don’t know.”

Steve nodded, his awkward position rocking his shoulders, too, and again, the motion of his body tugged at the Soldier, slid him deeper and made it easier. He bit his lip, shoved a little faster.

With an eerie, distant calm, Steve said, “Please don’t make me come again. I don’t want that. I felt something human in you all this time. I know it’s there. Please respect this at least, if they won’t let you respect anything else.”

Wordlessly, he pulled Steve up by his hips and got his knees under him so that the only place he had to touch him was the small of his back to steady himself. He adjusted him until the angle would be too uncomfortable for Steve to get hard from it, let alone come, and then he kept his hands to himself.

Steve pressed his face into the floor and wrapped his arms around the back of his head, leaving his weight on his elbows, and this time the Soldier let him hide.

When he finally finished, he reached without thinking to brush Steve’s too-long hair off of his neck, slipping it over his fingers.

Steve shrugged away. “Stop it,” he said tonelessly.

_”Stop it,” Steve said playfully, ducking away with a grin stretching across his thin face and eyes alight with fondness. “Quit being a jerk, Bucky.”_

He left quickly, pausing just long enough to watch Steve roll back up to his original position against the wall like nothing had happened, on guard and waiting.

His ears buzzed with white noise as a guard led him back to the lab, mind blank. He was insubstantial, incorporeal, floating on a wave of resignation that might as well carry him out to sea like so much chum.

The guard’s communicator buzzed halfway back. There was some kind of commotion two floors up that needed all hands. The Soldier, lost and beaten down as he was, needed no further instructions than to remand himself back to the lab, and the guard took off, certain that he would be obeyed.

The Soldier pressed his forehead into the wall, let his focus narrow to the gritty concrete scraping his skin. He was no tactician, but it seemed to him that maybe they had no goals. Maybe they just wanted Steve Rogers to suffer, and this was how they’d decided to do it. Maybe it would never end.

Finally, he dragged himself upright and wandered back to the lab. The halls were empty, everyone distracted. He’d rarely been alone here before. A few turns before the door he needed, though, he heard voices. He ignored them until Steve’s name floated out, and then he backtracked to listen.

“... why they don’t just fucking wipe him already and kill Rogers. Hand me those pliers.”

“I don’t ask questions, man. You know the long game they play.”

“But have you seen the fucking Soldier? It’s like watching a bear figure out how to load a revolver. It’s sad and creepy. He’s been out way too long.”

“You’re overtightening it. You’re gonna fucking strip it.”

“You want to do this? Be my guest. Fucking chair skeeves me out, anyway.”

Tendrils of dread clenched in the Soldier’s gut. They were working on the chair. So they were definitely planning to use it soon.

“If they wanted the star-spangled asshole dead, they’d have done it already. They’ve got their sights aimed higher. Why do you think they ordered these modifications?”

“So why all the foreplay?”

“They’re priming him for it. Making sure he’s nice and ripe.” A pause, metal grating. “Look, the way I see it, he may look like a dumb slab of muscle, but it’s his brain that makes him dangerous, you know? They don’t want to puree it like they do to the Soldier’s. They want to use it. They want to turn him, and then they want to send his ass back out in his stupid uniform to smile on TV and convince everyone that everything is a-okay.”

“Seems like a tall order. He’s too stubborn.”

“Yeah, I know, but that’s the point, isn’t it? They can’t crack open his head and dig around. They had to find an opening and burrow, subtle-like. And that shit takes time.”

“Thought you don’t ask questions?”

A laugh. “You don’t need to ask when you’re banging someone in the know, my friend. You wouldn’t believe the hard-on they’ve got for Rogers. They’d do anything to turn him. That’s why they’ve tossed all the Winter Soldier protocols.”

“Still don’t see why they couldn’t just wipe the creepy bastard, at least.”

“Think of it like baby ducks imprinting.”

“I always thought that was bullshit.”

“I don’t know, man, maybe it’s a metaphor. Just go with this. Cap gets fried in the chair, he opens his eyes, and there’s his buddy telling him to listen up and comply. You think the Soldier could pull that off straight out of cryo? Out of this contraption? They zap him, they lose that angle.”

“Hell of a risk.”

“Life is a risk. But if they’ve got Captain America, that’s the ballgame.”

He left quickly, leaden feet carrying him to the lab as his brain sparked back to life. They wanted to turn Steve into another Winter Soldier. No, more than that, they wanted to slide insidiously into his brain and infect his very life. There were two ways that could go. Steve’s unerring conviction, his innate righteousness, made him difficult. It was possible that it couldn’t be done, and Steve would simply disappear. He went cold at that, an icy torrent of fear running all the way down to his toes. The other possibility …

The other possibility, if they did manage to turn Steve’s conviction and will and cast him at their enemies, was worse. Steve was unstoppable with an idea in his head. If they had him ..

He wasn’t sure what Steve’s conviction devoid of his kindness, his _goodness_ , would look like, but he knew that for Steve, it would be worse than death. Worse than this torture.

All this time, all of it, was for this. All so Steve, disoriented and weakened, could be strapped into the chair and look up into the face he knew as his friend, imploring him to trust the people he’d devoted his life to destroying. It seemed like they’d be more successful without tipping their hand this soon, but he realized almost as soon as he considered it what their reasoning was. It was pure, arrogant spite. Whatever Steve had done to this organization, their enmity was so great that they were willing to risk their great plan just to twist the knife a little deeper, just so Steve would understand the scope and breadth of the evil they’d perpetrated against him before they consumed him whole. They wanted that victory lap. That was why they’d revealed him to Steve just before the end.

Cold fury narrowed his vision as he marched into the lab and allowed the techs to reach for him. Fury and a fierce, protective, new-found purpose. And he realized two things that fundamentally, irreversibly altered his world. One, that he was the Bucky Barnes of Steve Rogers’ memories, that Steve had meant something to him in another life; and two, that they’d been jerked around long enough, and Sarah Rogers had been right.

They could stand up and say no.

They could fight.


	10. Chapter 10

Bucky. Bucky Barnes. He’d absorbed the stories Steve had told, and the truth of them spread like oxygen. All it took was a breath to let it in, and it set off a chain reaction, his blood carrying it up to his brain to make everything clear and right. He’d volunteered for nothing. He didn’t know whether it was the lie they’d fed him or the absolution he’d given himself, that he must have believed, must have been willing to die for this. But he knew better now.

His thoughts ran together like melting ice cream when he thought about it too long: cold and sharp at first, distinct and layered, but eventually just one big mess all over him. (The comparison alone was only possible courtesy of the vivid dream he had that night of his family at Coney Island. His _family_. He’d almost wept before he’d gotten hold of himself and stuffed it back down. He’d had a family once. A family and Steve Rogers.) It was dangerous to linger there. He had to let it go until his final mission had been satisfied. 

Preparations would take time, of which he had very little left. Plans had been set into motion: Hydra’s, but also his. 

With Hydra gearing up for whatever it was that had every tech, soldier, and spy buzzing around, the Soldier had more leeway than usual. There were fewer personnel on-site, and after a series of messy missions that had apparently taken a chunk out of their strike force, they were even more strapped for manpower. All of their resources were focused in one direction. No one noticed the Soldier wandering the halls, and with how they’d beaten him down, no one cared. All of the fear and disquiet he had inspired all this time had evaporated, no longer an attack dog but instead a lovesick puppy, as one agent had joked in passing. The Soldier hung his head his head low.

No one noticed him paying attention, soaking up every word they said. Anticipation had made them careless.

He had five days until they started their procedures. Five days to prepare. Five days to pretend. 

He kept his eyes down and dragged his feet, but he went each time they directed him to the round room. Every time he arrived, Steve would wordlessly lie down or roll over, silent and unresisting. Just once, he’d turned away but stayed upright, waiting, thinking, praying, who knew. When Bucky Barnes had wrapped his fingers around the curve of his shoulder and pushed him down, he’d gone easily, guided to the floor.

If he’d thought about it when this had all begun, the Soldier would have said that he knew it would come to this. They all came to this. But having gotten to know him, the fight and the defiance in every inch of him, Bucky Barnes couldn’t quite believe that it had really happened. But he’d fix this. 

He couldn’t risk Steve knowing, not with the advantage they had with Steve seemingly defeated and docile. But he ached every time he set foot in that room, every time approached him. Steve was done talking, done asking questions. He’d forgiven, but somehow that was worse. The absolution was more painful than the accusation by far. 

It didn’t matter now. Now was the time to do what the Winter Soldier had really been trained for.

The lab was rarely empty, but with staff spread so thin and the lone tech suffering the unfortunate intestinal effects of the drug he’d slipped into her coffee, he stole a few minutes on their intranet. He wasted a precious two minutes familiarizing himself with their updated systems, but he was able to do what needed.

The Soldier was resting comfortably on his bedroll when she returned, groaning and muttering to herself.

On day four, with their teams out on bogus missions, a small fire in the lab, and a virus crippling their system, he finally had his chance. 

He entered the round room as usual, careful to keep his head low and his face blank, but inside, he was soaring. He wanted to grab Steve and run, make a break for it and never look back, but he’d never been sure of the level of surveillance in that room. He’d gotten away with quite a bit, but it seemed now that they’d planned for that. As it was, they knew things. They could always tell when he hadn’t yet finished, and they would make him wait. So he had to keep up appearances, but he didn’t have to draw it out.

This was the last time he would be forced to do this. No matter how this went, really. If they failed, they’d be killed. And if they survived, well, this was the last time he’d touch Steve. He knew that much. 

Steve seemed to see something different in him, for all that he barely looked up. He tensed and cringed away more than usual. But he didn’t fight, merely closed his eyes and waited.

When he finished, he lowered Steve to the floor, sunk down over him, and ghosted his lips over his neck, trying to get too close for any potential bugs to pick up his words. Steve shuddered and tried to squirm away, but the Soldier held firm. He pulled them closer together, as close as possible, still softening inside him.

Heart racing, he breathed, “I’m getting you out of here.”

Steve stopped struggling. “They’ll kill you.”

“I’m getting you out of here. You’ll have to pretend.”

Steve glanced over his shoulder. “Pretend what?”

“That you’re broken. That you’re compliant.” He started to ease out and sit up, but he kept his voice whisper-light. “Can you do that?”

Steve rolled onto his side. His expression was cautious but calculating, and that wouldn’t do. 

The Soldier shook his head. “No. You don’t look the part.”

Steve looked down at himself, really looked, and then raised his eyebrows at the Soldier. “This doesn’t look the part?”

“It’s your face,” he said, already considering what to do about it. “Here.”

He slapped Steve, hard enough to sting his palm.

But that only made him look angry, got his blood up. The Soldier slapped him again, to more of the same.

“Steve. Come on.”

Steve huffed in frustration. “I don’t know what you’re looking for here.”

Before he could talk himself down, he slapped Steve with his metal hand, hard enough to send him toppling over. Steve stayed down for a moment, but when he looked up, the bewildered hurt in his downturned eyes said everything. 

“Keep that expression. That’s the one. Now wait here.” He could have kicked himself after he said that, especially after Steve’s eyebrows pointedly went up, but he moved on. He was already pulling a small syringe from his belt as he stood, careful to conceal it in his palm.

He pounded on the door, unable to wait for them to let him out at their leisure this time. For a solid minute, nothing happened. It wasn’t until he switched to his metal hand that it opened.

“What do you think you’re doing, Soldier?” the guard barked. 

“Rogers is ready to comply,” he said, blank and cold, as though he had no stake in this.

The guard raised his eyebrows, leaning into the room to look at Steve.

Steve was dutifully keeping his face exactly as the Soldier had instructed him to and his body loose and defeated. The guard snorted, stepping in even farther, but he was mindful of the Soldier.

“Time to act,” he implored. “You know where to report this. And you know he’s too busy to drag down here.”

The guard’s face pinched in thought. The Soldier had a speech prepared about the urgency of the hour, but he didn’t have to. The guard understood.

At any other time, they might have come to Rogers in his cell to investigate, but with chaos reigning, he had the feeling that wouldn’t be the case. He hoped, at any rate. It would complicate things if they didn’t lead Steve out. Sure enough, the guard tossed him the set of keys that would unlock Steve’s heavy cuffs, then crossed his arms to wait by the door.

Steve said nothing as the Soldier undid the cuffs around his wrists and threw them to the floor, where they clanged so loudly that some distant part of the Soldier wondered how Steve had been dragging them around this whole time. His wrists were a mess beneath them, bruised and abraded, but that would have to wait for later. Steve rubbed them carefully as the Soldier moved onto his ankles. Here Steve twitched, but he allowed the Soldier to work. He watched the guard as surreptitiously as he could. When he pulled away, finished, the guard grunted, annoyed, and tossed him a different pair. He gritted his teeth as he replaced the cuffs with a magnetic pair and locked them together in front of him. 

Steve made a show of using the wall for support when he stood, flinching away from the Soldier and dragging himself upright much more pitifully than he really had to. The Soldier inwardly relaxed that Steve was playing his part so well. He tried not to wonder how much was exaggeration and pretend and how much was real.

The Soldier grabbed Steve by the arm and yanked. A thread of resistance pulled Steve back just for a second before he relaxed and allowed himself to be tugged along, marched out of the room and into the hallway beyond that he’d barely glimpsed. 

The halls were as empty as he’d planned, but outside the cell, Steve looked out of place and small. His bare feet slapped loudly across the floor as he lumbered heavily, goosebumps sprang up along his skin from the chill, and the starkness of his nudity and general grungy appearances against the gray sterility of the hallway was startling. 

Steve split his attention between his stumbling feet and the Soldier’s grip on his arm, head down. Every couple of feet, though, the his eyes would dart up for a split-second. The Soldier was certain that he was absorbing his surroundings and orienting himself in the space. 

He almost couldn’t believe it had been that simple. The hard part, getting Steve out of the round room, was over. He tried not to wonder if it would have been possible any sooner if only he’d tried. He didn’t think it would have been -- the timing was perfect, and more than that, they needed to genuinely believe that Steve had been through enough, been beaten down enough, that it was possible -- but it was a slippery thought that clung to him like oil.

When they finally reached the control room, the Soldier paused. He’d never been inside before, never had a reason to, and he didn’t know what to expect. But this was where the asshole who gave the orders tended to be and where he’d expected to be brought.

The locks on the door disengaged with a loud series of thunks. Before the Soldier could step inside, the guard yanked Steve into the room. Steve instinctively caught his balance first, but the guard gave him a hard shove in the back and he went down. And stayed down.

The Soldier followed. He waited behind Steve, paying him no mind.

Part of him started to slide down, caught in the undertow, as the officer stared at him, the same as always. Where before he’d just let it happen, hadn’t questioned it, this time he fought. This was a reaction they’d put in his head, a safeguard they’d come to rely on. When a superior addressed him, he was docile. When he was given an order, the thought of disobeying it sent pain lancing through his skull. These were things they’d done to him.

Why would they have needed to implant these things in a willing volunteer? How could he have ever been so stupid?

He dug his nails into his fingers while he tried to stay afloat. Concentrated on the room itself, the bank of screens (one of which was, in fact, a live feed of the round room), the guard with his hand on his weapon and his eyes on Steve’s ass. 

“You may stand, Captain,” he was saying. “Let’s have a look.”

He glanced quickly at Steve’s face before he stood, concerned that Steve wouldn’t be able to keep still, but he’d underestimated him. Steve’s expression hadn’t changed much since the Soldier had slapped him, just like he’d instructed, and the effect served to make him both meek and somewhat pitiable. Submissive and smaller than he was, even at his full height.

Harmless. Beat.

With his gloved hand on Steve’s bruising cheek, he asked, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Steve opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again, frowning. His chin dropped lower.

The delight in his eyes at Steve’s hesitation, at his uncertainty, lit up his face. “You may speak. But this is promising.”

“I’ll tell you whatever you want,” Steve said. “Do whatever you want.”

“And what do you want?”

“Just make it stop.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Soldier. “Make sure he never touches me again.”

A voluminous, deep laugh bubbled up his throat. He actually rubbed his hands together in glee. The Soldier realized how desperate they’d become, how obsessed they truly were. 

“Oh, Soldier. I underestimated you.” He turned back to Steve, looking him up and down more closely. “You’re in no position to bargain, but I’ll bite.” 

The man leaned closer, and Steve shifted his feet, hunched his shoulder in further. 

“Anything, Captain?”

Steve swallowed, nodding immediately. 

“I knew you’d see reason,” he said gently. “Pardon the cliche, but resistance is futile. I knew this reunion would cement it for you. You’re not really as stupid as you appear.”

He backed away to lean against the console, nodding to the guard. The Soldier didn’t turn around as he closed the door.

“This is joyous news,” he said pleasantly. “And just in time. I’ll bring you to Pierce, and you’ll tell him what you told me before we begin the procedures.” His smiled soured, his voice hardening. “But I won’t be made the fool. Prove yourself. Get on your knees.”

There was a tense moment where the Soldier wasn’t sure what Steve would do, if he understood how far he’d have to play this, if they were on the same page. This had been Steve’s stronghold of resistance: they’d used him, sure, but no one had successfully gotten him on his knees. The Soldier palmed the syringe back into his hand as carefully as he could, just in case.

Steve sunk to the floor.

It was a bittersweet relief.

As the Soldier moved out of the way, he realized that he didn’t even know his name. He rarely knew anyone’s name. No one ever bothered to tell him, and he’d grown so apathetic that he no longer noticed.

But the nameless officer paid him no mind as he opened his pants.

The Soldier didn’t watch. The choked, wet sounds were distracting enough. He concentrated on moving into position as unobtrusively as possible and waiting for the right moment. 

He marveled, as he quietly slid a length of IV tubing from the lab out of his sleeve, at how easily they had taken his compliance and docility for granted. The man barely reacted to the Soldier’s presence. If anything, it made him grunt and thrust harder. An ugly, uncharacteristic smile stretched the Soldier’s lips. What a fitting way to dispatch this man.

In a swift motion, he plucked the man’s sidearm from its holster, dropped it to the floor along with the syringe, and wrapped the tubing around the vulnerable throat thrown back before him in pleasure. While he pulled it taut and the man sputtered, the lingering guard surged forward.

Steve grabbed the syringe and jammed it into his thigh the second he was within arms’ reach. Enraged, he tackled Steve to the ground, but with a dose meant for the Soldier, it didn’t take long to take effect and put him down.

Steve watched his face while he held on. There were easier ways he could have done this, faster ways, but this was quiet and wouldn’t draw attention. And he wasn’t kidding himself: he wanted to inflict this. It wasn’t satisfying, but it was what he deserved for setting the Soldier on Steve, on all the other prisoners, on the world. It was the tip of the iceberg, he knew, but it was better than nothing.

When the Soldier dropped his body to the floor, Steve closed his eyes. 

“Get these off,” he said, trying to reach behind himself and not getting far with his hands bound together, wincing despite himself. 

The Soldier studied him briefly as he deactivated and removed the cuffs, realizing how spectacularly dense he must have been this whole time to not notice how the constant, prolonged positioning must have been damaging Steve’s shoulders. They would heal, probably, if Steve’s physiology was anything like his, but for now, and probably for some time, they were fucked. 

Steve tensed as he moved behind him. He paused, more to show that he’d noticed than to wait for permission. They didn’t have time for that. He peeled the patches away quickly, tossing them onto the floor. Then he moved back to the dead officer and started to strip his clothes.

When he finished and looked up, Steve had hauled himself up to the console and was on the computer, hands moving rapidly. 

“We have to get out of here, Steve,” he said quickly. He tossed the bundle of clothes at Steve’s feet. “Get dressed.”

“Hydra is planning something big,” Steve answered without looking up. “If I leave here empty-handed, then they win. People will die. And this will all have been for nothing.”

“What, you planned to get caught and experience their hospitality?”

“No. But I should get something out of it, don’t you think?”

The Soldier swore and moved the door to check for passersby. When no one appeared, he scanned the screens for movement elsewhere, confirming that their escape route was clear. 

“Fuck,” he finally snapped. “Move over and get dressed.”

Steve had already pulled up a decent number of files, but he had nothing to transfer them onto and the intranet led nowhere. The Soldier found a drive after rifling through some drawers, and he finished up while Steve pulled on the dead man’s clothes. 

He pretended not to notice when Steve scooped up the patches and pocketed them, busying himself with the man’s ID cards so they could move quickly past the building checkpoints.

“Walk like you belong,” he instructed Steve.

All told, it was shockingly uneventful as they wound their way up to the ground floor of the building. Any other time, every floor would have been teeming with people they would have had to subdue. 

Steve was sweating heavily and panting by the time they reached the final doors, the ones that would take them outside. The Soldier moved to support him, but Steve pulled away, leaning into the bar and throwing the door open instead.

The Soldier froze when fresh air hit his face. The sun was coming up, early morning light hitting his eyes so unlike the buzzing fluorescents of the compound. Steve kept moving. 

It was unreal how normal the building looked from the outside, just any other office space in the middle of a city. Steve seemed taken aback, like he’d expected to find himself looking at a bunker in the middle of nowhere. They walked for several blocks, cutting through alleys, before they spoke again.

“I know where we can lay low for a bit,” the Soldier said.

Bucky. His name was Bucky. He was out, his final mission was finished, and the Soldier was done. Outside, breathing fresh air of his own volition for the first time in … forever, really … 

Outside, he was Bucky Barnes. Time to try it on and get used to it.

“I know where we’re going,” Steve said. Exhaustion gave his voice a pinched quality, but purpose drove him forward. He was already rifling through the stolen wallet in his pocket. “Got to meet some friends of mine and finish this.”

“Steve, you’re hurt. You can barely move. You need a doctor, and you need to get the hell away from here. Just run. Don’t you want to get away from it all?”

Steve narrowed his eyes at him. “You don’t remember this now, but you will. I’ve never run from a fight before. I’m not planning to start now when that would be tantamount to a death sentence for millions. You saw those plans. We’re running out of time.” He snorted. “Anyway, if everything you’ve done to me hasn’t killed me yet, it’ll keep for a few more hours.”

He paused, something like regret flashing across his face.

Bucky’s mouth pressed into a thin line.

Steve’s face softened, something very sad creasing his brow. Haltingly, he reached out, his hand hovering somewhere near Bucky’s shoulder before he finally set it down and squeezed. “Bucky, you know you were raped, too, don’t you? Whether they … Whether they fucked you or not, they used your body. They forced acts on you that you wouldn’t have consented to under other circumstances. Certainly wouldn’t have _chosen_. It wasn’t your fault.”

Bucky swallowed, throat tight and painful. He looked away. “What was your plan?”

After a long, searching beat, Steve swiftly looked away. When he responded, it was like the past minute hadn’t happened. “First, tell me everything you can about them that’s not on this drive.”

So they marched, away from enemy territory and into the coming warzone, and Bucky talked and Steve listened, occasionally asking questions, as the sun rose fully in the open sky.

**Author's Note:**

> There will be a sequel addressing the events of this story.
> 
> A big thank you to everyone who read along on the meme as I worked on it, and especially to those who commented.


End file.
